One loyal reader recently wrote, in response to our earlier submission guide posts, the following:
Hey Dan. Just wanted to give you the heads up that both submission guides you posted a while back are seriously out of date. A bunch of the law reviews have started accepting Expresso or electronic submissions through their websites. E.g., Chicago and USC both prefer Expresso now. Near as I can tell, only four of the top 25-ish L. Revs. require paper — California (Boalt), Texas, Vanderbilt, and William & Mary.
Thanks. Anyone with new information should feel free to post in the comments.
Also, over at Laboratorium, James Grimmelmann (rising prawf at NYLS) has a post updating us about his SSRN protest. James writes:
I’ve just uploaded SSRN Considered Harmful to SSRN. It’s a short explanation of how SSRN’s policies impede open access and what SSRN should to to fix matters. I am attempting to engage SSRN in a discussion of this URL policy, and I hope that I will be able to revise this essay with an explanation that my criticisms are no longer accurate and that SSRN has become an appropriate place to post scholarship. Still, if that discussion does not work out and things don’t improve, the essay ends with a call to scholars to stop using SSRN. If you care about broad and free distribution of scholarship, please have a read.
To be fair, in an update, James notes “that I’m informed by a friend (and I’ve seen with my own eyes) that BEPress adds a cover page to some papers, including those in its ExpressO Preprint Series. I’ve been dealing with the Selected Works sites, which don’t watermark. Since only the former is generally open (the latter is in beta and is invitation-only), I’m concerned about the details.”
I tag Matt Bodie, our open-access czar: what say you? is this issue worth a spit?
Posted by Administrators on March 7, 2007 at 02:30 PM
Comments
One of the main problems I have with SSRN — and I’m not sure if anyone else has this problem — is that the Data Integrity Notice seems to be triggered capriciously and for no reason. I have one paper that has (by SSRN’s count) has received about 150 page views in the last month, but about 3 downloads. I went to a colleague’s office and asked him to try to download my paper; sure enough, a “data integrity notice” popped up.
That a user must see a DIN before downloading is not in itself something to be terribly concerned about (unless one *really* cares about download counts). However, the fact that the DIN screen actually turns away people from downloading papers by making them think they have to log in bothers me.
It is not the case, as suggested above, that SSRN requires a single click before downloading a paper; rather, it often requires a click and then requires a reader to go through fine print relating to a DIN to see an author’s work. I can perhaps understand the need for such notices when there are real signs of abuse, but where a paper has received 3 counted downloads over the past month, I just don’t see why SSRN must insist on cumbersome DIN screens.
I understand that SSRN is “free,” but they are also profiting off of our work; at the very least, they should try to make that work accessible, rather than let 3 downloads over the course of a month raise a “red flag” that dissuades users unaccustomed to SSRN’s interface from downloading the piece.
It looks like Bepress is beefing up its services (through unique, individualized author pages), and I understand that a third competitor is also putting together a site. Hopefully those sites’ more user-friendly interfaces cause those sites to catch on, or at least make SSRN rethink its approach.
I don’t have too many complaints about SSRN, but they seem insistent on making scholarship as hard to download as possible. It would be better to get rid of download counts entirely rather than require users who are new to SSRN to work through several pages just to download a piece in the name of ensuring the so-called “integrity” of those counts, particularly when DIN notices are triggered by as few as 3 downloads over a month-long period.
Posted by: andy | Mar 9, 2007 5:38:13 PM
Joe, actually I think all of these “more important things” will be irrelevant in the long run and possibly even in the surprisingly-shorter run. See Dan Hunter’s Open Access to Infinite Content for a forceful explanation of why the student-run quality-control system will not be a drag on scholarship for much longer. The critical ingredient in the transformation is actually . . . open access.
Posted by: James Grimmelmann | Mar 8, 2007 9:59:17 AM
I think all of the points raised are of almost no concern. Are you really that upset about a size 8 point font watermark? I mean, come on, isn’t there more important things to be concerned about (e.g., lack of peer review in law reviews, the whole expedite/manipulation mess, having law students decide what’s important legal scholarship)?
Posted by: Joe | Mar 8, 2007 8:28:18 AM
A few replies to some of Matt’s points:
The indirect download has always been critical to SSRN as a way of policing its download counts.
As I argue in the piece, policing download counts is not an important purpose and the indirect download system is not particularly well-tailored to that purpose. (I think it would survive rational basis review, though.)
James notes that the indirect download does not make the documents available to search engines for searching. But as he reports, SSRN is working with Google to develop a way of searching its database.
I’m not exactly happy that SSRN has decided to go with a single search provider. I have analogous concerns about concentration in the search market. It would be better for all involved if SSRN used standard protocols to open their papers up to search by all search providers. Microsoft, for example, is also now pushing strongly into the scholarly search market.
SSRN has to know that the lack of searchability is a big reason profs still use Westlaw and Lexis, and I would think they’re working on a solution.
SSRN’s apparent assumption that a solution means something they make themselves is, to me, a significant indication of the wrong mindset. The Web is creating solutions right and left, solving problems people didn’t even know they had. Openness here would harness that creativity to do great things for scholarly access.
Finally, James would like to use SSRN’s abstracting system to post a different download URL in his abstract. SSRN won’t let anyone post a URL in their abstracts. They have a content-neutral reason for this, but even if they just want to exclude other download URLs, I don’t have a big problem with that. They’re providing the abstracting service, so they should be able to prevent you from directing people elsewhere for a download.
The thing I can’t quite figure here is why they would want to. The reason that I want to use their abstracting service with a different download URL is that their abstracting service has huge mindshare and is dominant in its class. In other words, the abstracting service itself is the killer app; it’s what they currently do better than anyone else. Using that to leverage the distinctly not best-in-class hosting service smacks of anticompetitive tying.
I certainly respect James’s personal policy, and it seems like he may be having some success in getting changes made.
I can’t take credit here. I’m in conversation with SSRN, and I hope to make some progress. But the changes so far are results of some quite dedicated work by others who have raised open access concerns with SSRN before.
But I don’t agree that a boycott is necessary. The fact remains that SSRN is not an open-access institution. It is a privately owned for-profit company. It provides a great service, and it has revolutionized the availability of working papers. But if you’re looking for a true open-access repository, SSRN will never be that.
I’m more optimistic. I would love for SSRN to step up to the plate and do open access right. They have many of the pieces already. And I think that if they did open access right, they could make oodles of cash. Academia is big. I don’t think that being for-profit is intrinsically incompatible with open access (by way of comparison, companies such as IBM are huge contributors to open source projects). It just requires taking a longer view about what one’s business model might be.
One final question: wouldn’t a boycott of SSRN on these grounds require a boycott of law reviews and Westlaw and Lexis as well?
Well, when it comes to law reviews, I don’t believe one should publish with any journal whose policies are incompatible with open access principles. That means keeping sufficient copyrights to post online versions and to allow others to repost them. And yes, I would also say that one shouldn’t have the online PDF of one’s law review pieces contain a link back to its location on the law review’s web site. Experience with bit rot at law review sites suggests that they’re fairly unstable and not likely to be reliable archives in the long term.
As for Lexis and Westlaw, there aren’t good alternatives to them in the way that there are good alternatives to SSRN’s hosting. That state of affairs I expect to change.
Posted by: James Grimmelmann | Mar 7, 2007 10:04:46 PM
Just a note on the open access question:
I don’t agree with James that the new watermarking, the indirect download system, and the restrictions on URLs in the abstract are reasons to boycott SSRN. The watermarking may be unsightly, but it doesn’t really impact free access to papers. It directs people to SSRN for the paper; that is a pretty mild way of locking people in. The indirect download has always been critical to SSRN as a way of policing its download counts. James notes that the indirect download does not make the documents available to search engines for searching. But as he reports, SSRN is working with Google to develop a way of searching its database. SSRN has to know that the lack of searchability is a big reason profs still use Westlaw and Lexis, and I would think they’re working on a solution. Finally, James would like to use SSRN’s abstracting system to post a different download URL in his abstract. SSRN won’t let anyone post a URL in their abstracts. They have a content-neutral reason for this, but even if they just want to exclude other download URLs, I don’t have a big problem with that. They’re providing the abstracting service, so they should be able to prevent you from directing people elsewhere for a download.
I certainly respect James’s personal policy, and it seems like he may be having some success in getting changes made. But I don’t agree that a boycott is necessary. The fact remains that SSRN is not an open-access institution. It is a privately owned for-profit company. It provides a great service, and it has revolutionized the availability of working papers. But if you’re looking for a true open-access repository, SSRN will never be that. Of course, that doesn’t mean that it won’t respond to consumer pressure. But there may actually be times when law scholars are better served by a decision that goes against open-access principles. In such a situation, I trust that SSRN will seek to serve its clientele. For that reason, open-access advocates should encourage the use of SSRN combined with other open-access databases and/or should form their own open-access database that adheres strictly to open-access principles.
One final question: wouldn’t a boycott of SSRN on these grounds require a boycott of law reviews and Westlaw and Lexis as well?
Posted by: Matt Bodie | Mar 7, 2007 6:34:34 PM
From what I can tell Express-O itself now tells you whether law reviews accept its services and which law reviews have suggested a preference for using their own websites to submit (Harvard, Yale, Stanford, for example). I take it that no one is suggesting that this listing by Express-O is inaccurate?
Posted by: Glenn Cohen | Mar 7, 2007 3:19:38 PM