Social Science Research Network

The SSRN, formerly known as Social Science Research Network, is a repository for preprintsdevoted to the rapid dissemination of scholarly research in the social sciences, humanities, life sciences, health sciences, and more. Elsevier bought SSRN from Social Science Electronic Publishing Inc. in May 2016. Academic papers in Portable Document Format can be uploaded directly to the SSRN site by authors and are then available around the world via download. 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.[10] Academic papers in PDF can be uploaded directly to the SSRN site by authors and may then be available for downloading.[11] As of 2019, download by users is generally subject to registration or completion of a ReCAPTCHA challenge and therefore SSRN is not considered by some to be a suitable open access location,[12] unlike open archives like most institutional repositories. Publishers and institutions can upload papers and charge a fee for readers to download them.[13] 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.