The Social Science Research Network Has Jumped the Shark

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The Social Science Research Network Has Jumped the Shark<br>Significant and unwelcome changes to what had been legal academia's major open source scholarly repository and notice system

Stephen Bainbridge<br>Jun 03, 2026

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The Social Science Research Network (SSRN) was founded in 1994 by economists Michael C. Jensen and Wayne Marr, to serve as an open access repository of scholarship in law, economics, and other social sciences.1<br>In addition to providing a searchable depository of working papers and other scholarly items, SSRN also provided weekly emails of newly deposited papers in a wide variety of fields.<br>I use SSRN as my main depository for pre-publication drafts and, when permitted by the publishers, works as published. It’s been a considerable personal success. As of today, my papers have been downloaded 194,000 times. As a result, SSRN has contributed greatly to my visibility as a scholar. In addition, I’m ranked 13th out of 3,000 legal authors in total number of all-time downloads, which the law school has taken into account in various promotion and related decisions.<br>In 2016, the founders and other insiders took the Boeing,2 selling out to Elsevier. This resulted in what one observer aptly described as “much wringing of hands, gnashing of teeth, and the obligatory call for the community to pony up and create a true open piece of infrastructure.”<br>At the time, however, SSRN’s management team promised that:<br>Both existing and future SSRN content will be largely unaffected and … we’ll help researchers share post-submission versions of their work responsibly. Importantly, Elsevier respects our key values and core-proposition (free posting and reading) and commits that authors (or eventual publishers) will retain their copyright to any paper posted to SSRN.

And, in fact, I have noticed relatively little difference in the post-Elsevier SSRN.<br>Until now.<br>The UCLA Law Library has notified our faulty that SSRN has announced “significant and unwelcome changes,” including:<br>SSRN is discontinuing its Research Paper Series at the end of July.

Already-published papers and book chapters will no longer be eligible for posting on SSRN after July.

SSRN will require authors submitting preprints or working papers to select a CC-BY license. A CC-BY license permits others to distribute, remix, adapt, and build upon the work, including for commercial purposes, so long as appropriate attribution is given.

The research paper series has been an incredibly useful way of staying on top of recent scholarly developments. It gives you a listing of recently posted works and, crucially, each work’s abstract. As such, you know whether or not the paper looks to be of sufficient interest to justify downloading and reading the whole work. I shall miss it greatly.<br>Disallowing published works means that open access to my publications will become more difficult. Many are available freely on the publisher’s website, especially in the case of law reviews, but there is no single searchable depository (but see below) where you can get them all in one palce.<br>As for the CC-BY copyright license, it is the most open and permissive Creative Commons license. It allows anyone—including AI providers—to copy, distribute, remix, adapt, or build upon a creator’s work, even commercially, provided they give the original author credit for the creation. Once applied, a CC-BY license cannot be revoked by the creator. The license remains valid for the duration of the copyright of that work. It guts the author’s ability to impose any more significant limitations.<br>In response, UCLAW has adopted a policy that faculty working papers will be submitted to the University of California’s open access repository, eScholarship, rather than to SSRN.

I agree with and support this policy shift, but there are several problems that will follow:<br>At the moment, the UC eScholarship repository is incomplete. In my case, for example, there are 30 of my papers on the UC site. There are 124 on my SSRN author page. I gather they will be moving all of them over at some point, but it will take a while.

The UC eScholarship repository lacks the single author page SSRN offers. That page contains contact information and links to all of my posted works. It acts as a single hub for accessing my scholarship.

The eScholarship site does not offer the same kind of disciplinary current-awareness eJournal service that SSRN has provided for newly submitted papers.

The UC eScholarship repository is a UC site. SSRN offered researchers a single location to access work by global scholars. Literally thousands of institutions are represented on SSRN, as well as thousands of independent, unaffiliated authors. According to SSRN, there are papers from over 2,750,000 authors on the site. As such, SSRN provided researchers with a literal world of sources to explore and gave authors the whole world as an...