Social Science Research Network

Social Science Research Network

Logo of Social Science Research Network
URL	www.ssrn.com
Type of site	Scholarly Research
Registration	collaborative of over 174,000 authors and more than 1.3 million users
Available language(s)	English
Owner	Co-hosted by Korea University, Chicago Booth, European Corporate Governance Institute and Stanford Law School.

The Social Science Research Network (SSRN) is a website devoted to the rapid dissemination of scholarly research in the social sciences and humanities. SSRN was founded in 1994 by Michael Jensen (a financial economist) and Wayne Marr. Jensen continues to serve as chairman of the company. Gregg Gordon is SSRN's president and CEO.

In July 2011, "The Ranking Web of World repositories" (an initiative of the Cybermetrics Lab, a research group belonging to the Spanish National Research Council), ranked SSRN first among 1222 open access repositories in the world.^[1]

Academic papers in PDF can be uploaded directly to the site by authors. Most papers are available for worldwide free downloading, but there are papers available only for a fee. Users can also subscribe to abstracting email journals covering a broad range of subject matters. These e-journals then periodically distribute emails containing abstracts (with links to the full text where applicable) of papers recently submitted to SSRN in the respective field.

In economics, and to some degree in law (especially in the field of law and economics), almost all papers are now first published as preprints on SSRN and/or other paper distribution networks such as RePEc before being submitted to an academic journal.

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.^[2]

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.

See also

• Academic databases and search engines

References

External links

• SSRN
• The New Look at SSRN: An Interview with Gregg Gordon, from PrawfsBlawg (August 2008)
• Link by Link - Now Professors Get Their Star Rankings, Too, a New York Times article (June 2008)
• Interview with SSRN's Founder, from Growthology.org (June 2008)
• Creating Scholarly Communities and Fostering Innovation, from PKP Scholarly Publishing Conference Blog (July 2007)
• An Interview with SSRN's Gregg Gordon, from Prawfsblawg (June 2006)
• The Publisher, an article about the origin of SSRN
• SSRN Considered Harmful, an article critical of SSRN policies.