Friday 20 May 2016

Goodbye SSRN

SSRN has been sucked into the Death Star of academic publishing, the Dutch company called Elsevier. The story is here. It's obvious what they are about -- making it impossible for people to read versions of papers published in Elsevier journals in a slightly earlier version. If you happen not to be part of the $40 per pdf paying crowd, that was a great alternative; find the same paper's wp on SSRN, and be done. Despite some weasly-worded promises, it's clear that this is what Elsevier wants to stop. After buying Mendeley, a platform for citation management and paper depository, Elsevier is basically trying to capture enough of the knowledge-sharing between academics to stop threats to its hyper-profitable overcharge-for-open-access-or-subscription model.

There is a credible alternative view, espoused here: that it's all about the value of data to Elsevier. I am skeptical... surely a firm like Elsevier could have gotten that kind of data for less?

Be that as it may: For the last 15 years, I uploaded my papers religiously on SSRN. I even had a line below my signature advertising my latest working papers there. It was a great platform to make stuff available. But barriers to entry are L O W. When I have a minute, I will move stuff to REPEC or IDEAS; there will surely be a competitor along that does at least as good a job as SSRN (which was never that great to start with). 

No comments:

Post a Comment