Professor Bainbridge...on law, politics, religion, culture & food

Fixing SSRN

In my email inbox, there are currently 8 unread emails from SSRN providing abstracts of newly published papers. There are also two emails informing me of a new (at least to me) abstracting “journal” entitled CGA: Interests, Rights & Equitable Treatment of Shareholders and advising that my paper The Case for Limited Shareholder Voting Rights is now one of the top ten most downloaded papers abstracted in that journal. Huzzah!

SSRN started out as a scholarship depository that would send you regular emails providing abstracts of recent papers. Unfortunately, it is now suffering from a severe case of middle-aged bloat. In the Legal Network’s Corporate Law topic alone, there are 6 abstracting “journals.” That’s six emails a week (or more), often with many duplicative abstracts. Not to mention abstracting journals over in the Finance Network and others that might be of interest.

There has got to be a better way for SSRN to communicate with its users. I’d like to see at least three preliminary steps. 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.

In sum, instead of reading dozens of emails a week, I want to have a single RSS feed I can browse in Google Reader. Now.

I note, by the way, that Gordon Smith wrote about this last spring:

I spent some time paring my bloated subscription list on SSRN today after receiving way too many emails that I simply deleted. SSRN is a great service, but I am tired of the email delivery system. Scrolling through email after email—many with overlapping content—is too cumbersome. SSRN provides RSS feeds for individual author pages, but other subscriptions are not available via RSS. I wrote to SSRN and mentioned this, and I was told

Unfortunately, at this time, we only provide RSS feeds for author pages. We do plan to add RSS journal subscription feed functionality in future development.

Even if that eventually happens, it would only solve my #2 suggestion.