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More on Fixing SSRN

I recently proposed three changes I’d like to see SSRN make: First, combine all subtopic abstracting journals. There should just be one corporate and securities journal. Second, email is so yesterday. RSS feeds are the way to go. There ought to be a RSS feed for every journal. Third, there ought to be a way to combine RSS feeds from multiple networks and topics into a single feed.

Daniel Solove now offers some additional suggestions, some of which I think are very well-taken:

SSRN needs better search functionality. The full text of PDFs should be searchable on Google. Ideally, the SSRN site would incorporate a Boolean search capability similar to that of Westlaw or Lexis. Right now, SSRN allows the searching of abstracts, but that’s often not helpful enough for research purposes.

Agreed.

SSRN should allow for an indication of the draft/final status of a paper. Many articles on SSRN are old drafts of pieces that exist in final published form elsewhere. I often have no way of knowing if a paper on SSRN is the final version or just a draft. If it is just a draft and the final version exists on Westlaw, I’d rather read the Westlaw version. But if it is a final PDF, then I’d rather read that version. So there should be an icon or some kind of notation on the abstract page to indicate whether the paper is a draft or a final version.

Agreed.

SSRN emails should include a listing of drafts that were replaced by final versions. ...

No. No. A 1000 times no. The whole goal has to be to eliminate SSRN emails. Today alone I received three abstracting emails from SSRN. It’s too much, with too much duplication. A single RSS feed per topic area combined with the ability to merge topical RSS feeds into a single feed is the way to go.

SSRN should create a series of automated blogs, which contain the abstracts of newly posted papers. This is similar to Smith and Bainbridge’s suggestion of an RSS feed.

No, it isn’t. A RSS feed can be read from any news reader. It allows you to see what’s new on SSRN at the same time you’re checking blog feeds, news, sports scores, and all the rest of the information that you can now get by RSS. SSRN is just one of countless information streams I receive every day. Increasingly, my RSS reader acts as an aggregator, allowing me to view and scan multiple content streams in a timely fashion. An automated blog won’t do that, unless it has a RSS feed, in which case why are we screwing around with the automated blog? In addition, unlike “automated blogs,” RSS facilitates user-selected organization of content. Relevant messages can be easily archived by user selected topics, in a fully automated way.

If an author desires it, there should be an option to allow readers to post comments on an article’s abstract page. This would facilitate discussion about an article. Authors could, at their discretion, disallow comments. And authors could delete offensive comments.

Not sure. Would you want anonymous comments? (No.) Would you want any Tom, Dick, or Harry with an internet connection to comment or just serious academics? (The latter.) Who moderates comments?

There should be a section in abstract pages where authors can provide links to other online resources related to an article. For example, articles are often written about in blogs or in law review forums. It would be great if an author could provide links to these discussions on the SSRN abstract page. The SSRN abstract page should be a repository for discussion and commentary about an article. Right now, SSRN pages are rather static and dull. SSRN should be taking greater advantage of the interactive nature of the Internet—abstract pages could serve as a useful research tool, a central place for finding commentary about a particular piece of scholarship.

Agreed. Now I suspect Bernie Black and Michael Jensen will be asking: And who’s going to pay for all this?

Now let’s turn to a broader question. What is the purpose of SSRN? Daniel says:

One of the original purposes of SSRN was to allow scholars to share works in progress and to get comments on drafts prior to publication. In my experience, SSRN has only partially succeeded in this function. When I post drafts, rarely will I receive many emails from scholars with comments. I often send drafts of my work out to several scholars for their comments, and by and large, this is how I obtain feedback on drafts. Occasionally, I have received some thoughtful comments about a draft I posted on SSRN, but this has not happened very frequently and seems to be happening less often each time I post a paper.

But SSRN has taken on a new valuable function—to distribute PDF versions of final published works. This is how I now primarily use SSRN. I will still post a draft of a particular work—usually around the time I submit to law reviews or shortly after my article is accepted by law reviews—and then I will replace that draft with the final published version when it comes out. So I use SSRN to store my final published work.

I agree that SSRN does not generate much in the way of comments on working paper drafts. I can count the number of unsolicited comments I’ve received about SSRN postings on the figures of one hand, despite the fact that I aggressively advertise my SSRN postings.

I have not done very much in the way of posting PDFs of finished drafts to SSRN. I’d have to go back and check to make sure, but my recollection is that most of my law review publication contracts contemplate allowing a working draft to be put up on SSRN, but don’t allow a final draft to be posted to SSRN. But since my SSRN download count is like crack for me, maybe I should look into it. Eh?

I view SSRN as having two main purposes. First, I don’t post working drafts. I post my final drafts so as to get them out in the world as soon as they are done without having to wait for the law review publication process. This is especially valuable with time sensitive articles, where you want to get out fast so as to establish your priority and to position the paper for maximum impact. It boosts your SSRN download counts and likely increases your Westlaw/Lexis hit counts.

Second, I use SSRN as a way of getting at the economics and finance literature. I probably ought to use JSTOR or JEL or some other database, but SSRN is available free from any computer with an internet connection. If you look at the footnotes of my articles, very few cites to SSRN papers are to articles by law professors. They’re almost all cites to papers from some social science discipline.

Update: In a comment to his post, Daniel responds:

Stephen is also not keen with my suggestion of including a list of final versions in emails, primarily because he loathes the SSRN emails. I’m not so down on the emails, but I do wish that they would be consolidated. The ideal solution: People subscribe to all the journals they want, and then abstracts from those journals are automatically combined into one email that is sent out to each person once a week.

Here’s why I’m “down” on emails. Think of SSRN emails as newsletters. Then go read The Future of RSS - Is E-Mail Publishing Dead? RSS-based Information And News Feeds: Pros and Cons For Content Distribution Through RSS. Money quotes:

Using RSS as a source of timely and up-to-date information is a positive evolution and a definite step forward from where we are now. The advantages of RSS over traditional emails are:

1) RSS is timely. Subscribers get updates and breaking news as soon as they are published and not on the date the newsletter is due. RSS allows us to plug into selected sources of information, like independent reporters, researchers and industry analysts and when they disseminate or report some new information, it allows us to be the first to get it, without having to subscribe to any newsletter, or having to disclose our email address to a new, unknown company.

2) RSS is cost-effective. Cost of delivery and distribution is reduced dramatically. No more paying a mailing list distribution provider, nor having to format and layout news and articles for a different media than the website. {Bernie and Mike will like that!} ...

4) RSS is email independent. Email client not required. RSS news and feeds can be easily read online, aggregated into a web page journal/portal, sent out to SMS clients or managed to create new online content.

5) RSS can be fully integrated fully in your email. Yes, no one forbids the final user from using new services and tools which do allow perfect integration and receipt of RSS feeds inside your email Inbox (e.g., NewsGator, BlogStreet Info Aggregator).

6) RSS facilitates organization of content. Relevant messages can be easily archived, sorted and organized according to topic, in a fully automated way, something impossible with previously non-standard newsletters.

7) The subscriber is again in full control. Subscription and removal from a news feed is totally under the control of the user, unlike now where users may receive many newsletters that make it very hard or unintuitive to unsubscribe. ...

9) RSS is fully resuable. RSS is a structured, re-usable content protocol that allows the content to be reused for many other purposes: feeding of other news channels and Web pages, integration into dynamic libraries and learning objects.

10) RSS is searchable. RSS can be fully indexed and searched just as Google does with the HTML content on the Internet. See Feedster for a great live example.

...

12) RSS is modifiable. Even after it has been sent out. Nobody forbids your ability to change a current posting, or revise an errata, and thus RSS subscribers indeed seamlessly receive that posted update. As a matter of fact, RSS posts can be also removed or expired, and while some would argue that this is not completely feasible, there is certainly a wide open opportunity to explore further in this direction....

15) RSS can be monetized. RSS can support free as well as paid content distribution. Some publishers have already started text ads into their RSS-delivered news feeds. The good news is that if you don’t like it, you can unsubscribe in a matter of seconds, without having to ask anyone’s permission. {Bernie and Mike might like that too}

Of course, as the article suggests, there are some “cons.” But most of them seem inapplicable to SSRN. The two that would most need to be addressed include:

6) RSS requires us to adopt yet one more tool. Currently, accessing RSS-based news feeds requires a separate software tool. This may prevent novice and non-technical users from easily adopting RSS as a format that they can fully leverage to stay updated on their favorite sites. ...

11) RSS comes in many flavours. Recently RSS has seen a number of different versions of its specification appear, and therefore it should come as no surprise to see listings indicating support for RSS 0.9, 1.x, 2.x. There is indeed a set of different possible implementations of RSS with differing qualities and capabilities. Suffice it to say for now that most news readers and aggregators read all of these different formats, making the issue not critical for end users. It is rather on the part of both content publishers and subscribers to activate and engage themselves in understanding which of possible standards may best benefit their specific needs and requirements.

The author concludes:

In the wake of the quickly spreading rumour, Email is Dead, long live RSS, the superficial, non-technical reader lost early reference to the fact that what is being really touted is the death of e-mail publishing such as newsletter distribution and mail discussion lists. It is these type of email communications that according to these authors would be soon succumbing to an RSS flavoured distribution medium, and not the whole email-based exchange universe.

So we are in effect not talking at all about the possible death of email as we now know it (though a good review of it - how we use it and misuse it - is way overdue) but about the raise of RSS-based news feeds as an effective and efficient distribution medium for news, newsletter type content and other selected and highly focused types of information

That’s why I think RSS would be far superior to email.