The Social Science Research Network (SSRN) has been acquired by Elsevier with the promise that it will be further developed with Mendeley, Elsevier’s scholarly collaboration network, to provide users with leading content, data linking, enhanced metrics and researcher workflow tools. PR Newswire brought this interesting news to us in their article, “Elsevier Acquires the Social Science Research Network (SSRN), the Leading Social Science and Humanities Repository and Online Community.”
Founded in 1994, SSRN is a Rochester, NY-based scholarly research preprint repository and online community.
There are many in the information management world that are not happy with this move. There are concerns about copyrights and access. The Authors Alliance are concerned about Elsevier’s intentions for maintaining or improving those aspects of SSRN that have made it work for open scholarship. They are asking their members to take affirmative steps now to ensure that their work is made available on their terms regardless of what happens to SSRN.
Access is important. Proper indexing against a strong standards-based taxonomy increases the findability of data. Access Innovations is one of a very small number of companies able to help its clients generate ANSI/ISO/W3C-compliant taxonomies.
Melody K. Smith
Sponsored by Data Harmony, a unit of Access Innovations, the world leader in indexing and making content findable.
