SSRN is expanding its coverage
As reported by Peter Suber, Open Access News, the Social Science Research Network (SSRN) is expanding its coverage to include, among other things, a new Philosphy Research Network. I have long been a fan of the SSRN. For some time now, most of the authors whose work I followed in the areas of law and law and economics routinely posted their working papers to SSRN. I didn’t realize several things about then network, however, and Peter Suber has brought them to my attention. First off, I didn’t know that it was hosted right here at UT Austin. I am still a bit skeptical about this. Is this really true? Let’s see… Hmm. SSRN is a corporate entity that is mirrored on four sites, none of which is UT Austin. UT Austin is not mentioned anywhere on the site. I guess I just don’t believe this. No big deal. It either is or it isn’t.
I also didn’t realize more serious things about the network. Peter Suber notes that all papers must be posted as pdfs. He also observes that:
SSRN imposes restrictions unheard of at other OA repositories. For example, it adds an SSRN watermark to the pages of some deposited articles and only allows links to SSRN papers in abstracts. As Vincent Müller pointed out to me, it doesn’t support data harvesting by ROAR.
See Peter’s note for more details. Nonetheless, despite its limitations, it has been enormously successful and illustrates a model for other repositories. There is no single model going forward and what works today may not work tomorrow. Peter says he’ll monitor it for changes on the points he complains about.
