Good-Bye, SSRN

By James Kwak

You may know that SSRN, the shared web server for social science and law papers, was recently bought by Elsevier, a publishing company that charges what many people think are outrageous amounts for subscriptions to its journals or access to individual papers. Recently, Elsevier appears to have started taking down papers from SSRN without notifying the authors, even when the authors in some cases had valid permission to publish those papers on SSRN.

Elsevier’s defense is that this was a simple employee mistake (maybe like forgetting to rewrite direct quotes from someone else’s speeches?): “A couple of processing emails were sent incorrectly and in the wrong order.” I’m not buying it, though. Even if the wrong email was sent, they were still taking down papers unilaterally without bothering to ask if the author had the appropriate rights. If they’re not doing it in response to a DMCA notice, and they have people doing it manually, they could at least send the email first before deleting the paper.

If you’re interested in the issue, there is some detailed analysis in the comment section of PrawfsBlawg. In any case, it was enough for me to stop using SSRN. In my view, SSRN is really just ugly, clunky PDF hosting anyway. The main way I use it is as follows:

Find out about paper through some better filtering mechanism (email, blog, Twitter, or, most often, Google).
Google the title of the paper.
See link to paper on SSRN.
Follow link and download paper.

As you can see, nothing about that process relies on SSRN; if the paper were hosted anywhere else within reach of Google’s robots, it would work just as well. In theory, SSRN could be a place for people to actually discover relevant work, but for the most part it fails miserably at that because (a) it’s not as comprehensive as Google, so you can’t rely on a search there and (b) its usability is stuck in the mid-1990s.

So anyway, I uploaded my papers to a new page on my personal website, which allows you to download PDFs just as well as SSRN does. It’s hosted by WordPress.com, which means that you could do the same with about ten minutes of setup effort and another minute or so per paper, all for free. Or I imagine you could use bepress or SocArKiv. It really doesn’t matter. As long as your paper is somewhere on the Internet that is visible to Google, it will work just as well.

Now: How can I completely eliminate my papers from SSRN (not just take down the PDFs) so they don’t appear at all? It’s not at all apparent from their horrible user interface.