Social Science Research Network

Last updated
SSRN
SSRN Logo.svg
Producer Elsevier
History1994–present
Languages English
Access
CostMostly fee-free (monetarily gratis)
Coverage
Disciplines Social sciences, engineering sciences, humanities, life sciences, applied sciences, health sciences, and physical sciences
Record depthIndex, abstract, and full-text
Format coveragePapers
Links
Website www.ssrn.com

The Social Science Research Network (SSRN) is a repository for preprints devoted to the rapid dissemination of scholarly research in the social sciences, humanities, life sciences, and health sciences, among others. Elsevier bought SSRN from Social Science Electronic Publishing Inc. in May 2016. [1] It is not an electronic journal, but rather an eLibrary and search engine. [2]

Contents

History

SSRN was founded in 1994 by Michael C. Jensen and Wayne Marr, both financial economists. [3]

In January 2013, SSRN was ranked the largest open-access repository in the world by Ranking Web of Repositories (an initiative of the Cybermetrics Lab, a research group belonging to the Spanish National Research Council), [4] measured by number of PDF files, backlinks and Google Scholar results. [5]

In May 2016, SSRN was bought from Social Science Electronic Publishing Inc. by Elsevier. [1] On 17 May 2016, the SSRN founder and chairman Michael C. Jensen wrote a letter to the SSRN community in which he cited SSRN CEO Gregg Gordon's post on the Elsevier Connect [6] and the "new opportunities" coming from the fusion, [7] such as a broader global network and the freedom "to upload and download papers" (with more data, more resources, as well as new management tools). While predicting "some conflicts" on the interests alignment of the former competitors, he defined them as "surmountable". [8]

In July 2016 there were reports of papers being removed from SSRN without notice; revision comments from SSRN indicated this was due to copyright concerns. [9] Gordon characterized the issue as a mistake affecting about 20 papers. [10]

Operations

Academic papers in Portable Document Format can be uploaded directly to the SSRN site by authors and are then available around the world for download. [11] Users can also subscribe to abstracting emails covering a broad range of research areas and topic specialties. These distributing emails contain abstracts (with links to the full text where applicable) of papers recently submitted to SSRN in the respective field.

SSRN, like other preprint services, circulates publications throughout the scholarly community at an early stage, permitting the author to incorporate comments into the final version of the paper before its publication in a journal. Moreover, even if access to the published paper is restricted, access to the original working paper remains open through SSRN, so long as the author decides to keep the paper up. Often authors take papers down at the request of publishers, particularly if they are published by commercial or university presses that depend on payment for paper copies or online access. [12]

As of 2019, download by users is generally subject to registration and/or completion of a ReCAPTCHA challenge and therefore SSRN is not considered by some to be a suitable open access location, [13] unlike open archives like most institutional repositories. Publishers and institutions can upload papers and charge a fee for readers to download them. [14]

On SSRN, authors and papers are ranked by their number of downloads, which has become an informal indicator of popularity on prepress and open access sites. [15]

See also

Related Research Articles

arXiv Online archive of e-preprints

arXiv is an open-access repository of electronic preprints and postprints approved for posting after moderation, but not peer review. It consists of scientific papers in the fields of mathematics, physics, astronomy, electrical engineering, computer science, quantitative biology, statistics, mathematical finance and economics, which can be accessed online. In many fields of mathematics and physics, almost all scientific papers are self-archived on the arXiv repository before publication in a peer-reviewed journal. Some publishers also grant permission for authors to archive the peer-reviewed postprint. Begun on August 14, 1991, arXiv.org passed the half-million-article milestone on October 3, 2008, had hit a million by the end of 2014 and two million by the end of 2021. As of April 2021, the submission rate is about 16,000 articles per month.

<span class="mw-page-title-main">Preprint</span> Academic paper prior to journal publication

In academic publishing, a preprint is a version of a scholarly or scientific paper that precedes formal peer review and publication in a peer-reviewed scholarly or scientific journal. The preprint may be available, often as a non-typeset version available free, before or after a paper is published in a journal.

<span class="mw-page-title-main">Academic publishing</span> Subfield of publishing distributing academic research and scholarship

Academic publishing is the subfield of publishing which distributes academic research and scholarship. Most academic work is published in academic journal articles, books or thesis. The part of academic written output that is not formally published but merely printed up or posted on the Internet is often called "grey literature". Most scientific and scholarly journals, and many academic and scholarly books, though not all, are based on some form of peer review or editorial refereeing to qualify texts for publication. Peer review quality and selectivity standards vary greatly from journal to journal, publisher to publisher, and field to field.

<span class="mw-page-title-main">Academic journal</span> Peer-reviewed scholarly periodical

An academic journal or scholarly journal is a periodical publication in which scholarship relating to a particular academic discipline is published. Academic journals serve as permanent and transparent forums for the presentation, scrutiny, and discussion of research. They nearly universally require peer review for research articles or other scrutiny from contemporaries competent and established in their respective fields.

<span class="mw-page-title-main">Open access</span> Research publications distributed freely online

Open access (OA) is a set of principles and a range of practices through which research outputs are distributed online, free of access charges or other barriers. With open access strictly defined, or libre open access, barriers to copying or reuse are also reduced or removed by applying an open license for copyright.

<span class="mw-page-title-main">Google Scholar</span> Academic search service by Google

Google Scholar is a freely accessible web search engine that indexes the full text or metadata of scholarly literature across an array of publishing formats and disciplines. Released in beta in November 2004, the Google Scholar index includes peer-reviewed online academic journals and books, conference papers, theses and dissertations, preprints, abstracts, technical reports, and other scholarly literature, including court opinions and patents.

PubMed Central (PMC) is a free digital repository that archives open access full-text scholarly articles that have been published in biomedical and life sciences journals. As one of the major research databases developed by the National Center for Biotechnology Information (NCBI), PubMed Central is more than a document repository. Submissions to PMC are indexed and formatted for enhanced metadata, medical ontology, and unique identifiers which enrich the XML structured data for each article. Content within PMC can be linked to other NCBI databases and accessed via Entrez search and retrieval systems, further enhancing the public's ability to discover, read and build upon its biomedical knowledge.

Michael Cole "Mike" Jensen is an American economist who works in the area of financial economics. Between 2000 and 2009 he worked for the Monitor Company Group, a strategy-consulting firm which became "Monitor Deloitte" in 2013. He holds the position of Jesse Isidor Straus Professor of Business Administration, Emeritus, at Harvard University.

<span class="mw-page-title-main">Self-archiving</span> Authorial deposit of documents to provide open access

Self-archiving is the act of depositing a free copy of an electronic document online in order to provide open access to it. The term usually refers to the self-archiving of peer-reviewed research journal and conference articles, as well as theses and book chapters, deposited in the author's own institutional repository or open archive for the purpose of maximizing its accessibility, usage and citation impact. The term green open access has become common in recent years, distinguishing this approach from gold open access, where the journal itself makes the articles publicly available without charge to the reader.

Citation impact or citation rate is a measure of how many times an academic journal article or book or author is cited by other articles, books or authors. Citation counts are interpreted as measures of the impact or influence of academic work and have given rise to the field of bibliometrics or scientometrics, specializing in the study of patterns of academic impact through citation analysis. The importance of journals can be measured by the average citation rate, the ratio of number of citations to number articles published within a given time period and in a given index, such as the journal impact factor or the citescore. It is used by academic institutions in decisions about academic tenure, promotion and hiring, and hence also used by authors in deciding which journal to publish in. Citation-like measures are also used in other fields that do ranking, such as Google's PageRank algorithm, software metrics, college and university rankings, and business performance indicators.

Research Papers in Economics (RePEc) is a collaborative effort of hundreds of volunteers in many countries to enhance the dissemination of research in economics. The heart of the project is a decentralized database of working papers, preprints, journal articles, and software components. The project started in 1997. Its precursor NetEc dates back to 1993.

<span class="mw-page-title-main">Open science</span> Generally available scientific research

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hprints is an archive for electronic preprints of academic papers in the fields of arts and humanities. It can be accessed freely via the Internet since it is an open access repository aiming at making scholarly documents publicly available to the widest possible audience.

<span class="mw-page-title-main">Academia.edu</span> Commercial social networking website for academics

Academia.edu is a for-profit open repository of academic articles free to read by visitors. Uploading and downloading is restricted to registered users. Additional features are accessible only as a paid subscription. Since 2016 various social networking utilities have been added.

The Cybermetrics Lab is a research group of the Spanish National Research Council (CSIC). The organization is responsible for editing the Webometrics Ranking of World Universities. Currently more than 48,000 web domains of academic and research organizations are analyzed and are ranked according to their web presence and link visibility.

ResearchGate is a European commercial social networking site for scientists and researchers to share papers, ask and answer questions, and find collaborators. According to a 2014 study by Nature and a 2016 article in Times Higher Education, it is the largest academic social network in terms of active users, although other services have more registered users, and a 2015–2016 survey suggests that almost as many academics have Google Scholar profiles.

Data publishing is the act of releasing research data in published form for use by others. It is a practice consisting in preparing certain data or data set(s) for public use thus to make them available to everyone to use as they wish. This practice is an integral part of the open science movement. There is a large and multidisciplinary consensus on the benefits resulting from this practice.

<span class="mw-page-title-main">Sci-Hub</span> Scientific research paper file sharing website

Sci-Hub is a shadow library website that provides free access to millions of research papers, regardless of copyright, by bypassing publishers' paywalls in various ways. Unlike Library Genesis, it does not provide access to books. Sci-Hub was founded in Kazakhstan by Alexandra Elbakyan in 2011, in response to the high cost of research papers behind paywalls. The site is extensively used worldwide. In September 2019, the site's operator(s) said that it served approximately 400,000 requests per day. In addition to its intensive use, Sci-Hub stands out among other shadow libraries because of its easy use/reliability and because of the enormous size of its collection: a 2021 study estimated, that Sci-Hub provided access to 95% of all scholarly publications with issued DOI numbers, and on 15 July 2022 Sci-Hub reported that its collection comprises 88,343,822 files.

There are a number of approaches to ranking academic publishing groups and publishers. Rankings rely on subjective impressions by the scholarly community, on analyses of prize winners of scientific associations, discipline, a publisher's reputation, and its impact factor.

<span class="mw-page-title-main">SocArXiv</span> Open archive of the social sciences

SocArXiv is an online paper server for the social sciences founded by sociologist Philip N. Cohen in partnership with the non-profit Center for Open Science. It is an open archive based on the ArXiv preprint server model used for the natural sciences, mathematics, and computer science. The site describes itself as an "open archive of the social sciences, [which] provides a free, non-profit, open access platform for social scientists to upload working papers, preprints, and published papers, with the option to link data and code." It also hosts papers in the areas of arts and humanities, education, and law.

References

  1. 1 2 Gordon, Gregg (17 May 2016). "SSRN—a leading social science and humanities repository and online community—joins Elsevier". Elsevier Connect. Elsevier. Retrieved 17 May 2016.
  2. "SSRN Paper Submission Process" (PDF). SSRN.
  3. Feltner, Kerry (2016-06-03). "Dutch company acquires firm in Brighton". Rochester Business Journal. Retrieved 2020-03-21.
  4. "World". Ranking Web of Repositories. Cybermetrics Lab. January 2013. Archived from the original on 2013-06-29. Retrieved 11 June 2013.
  5. "Methodology". Archived from the original on 2013-07-01.
  6. Elsevier Connect
  7. Gregg Gordon (May 17, 2016). "Photo" [SSRN—the leading social science and humanities repository and online community—joins Elsevier].
  8. Michael C. Jensen (May 17, 2016). "From The Desk of Michael C. Jensen, Chairman". SSRN.
  9. Masnick, Mike (18 July 2016). "Just as Open Competitor to Elsevier's SSRN Launches, SSRN Accused Of Copyright Crackdown". Techdirt . Retrieved 6 August 2016.
  10. Straumsheim, Carl (19 July 2016). "There Isn't Some Big Conspiracy Happening". Inside Higher Ed. Retrieved 6 August 2016.
  11. In case the web page [formerly] at https://support.ssrn.com/knowledgebase.php?article=67 is now a "dead link", please see (instead) this 'extant' web page: "How do I submit to SSRN?". SSRN. 2014-12-03. Archived from the original on June 29, 2016. Retrieved February 3, 2022. (QUOTE:) [...] you upload your PDF
  12. Ashish SIngh (2021-07-21). "Praxis International Journal of Social Science and Literature". Pijssl.com. Retrieved 2020-03-21.
  13. Richard Orr (2020-12-31). "What counts as an Open Access location?". Unpaywall.
  14. Jensen, Michael C. (2 February 2012). "About SSRN". Social Science Research Network. Retrieved 30 December 2013.
  15. Black, Bernard S.; Caron, Paul (2006). "Ranking Law Schools: Using SSRN to Measure Scholarly Performance". Indiana Law Journal. 81 (Symposium on The Next Generation of Law School Rankings). SSRN   784764. U of Texas law, Law and Econ Research Paper No. 52; U of Cincinnati Public Law Research Paper No. 05-14.