2015 Mid-Year President’s Letter

ssrn_researchimageSSRN has delivered close to 88 million full-text PDF downloads and we are pleased with our continued growth. The SSRN eLibrary currently contains 613,000 paper abstracts from 283,000 authors and received 64,000 new full-text submissions in the past year. SSRN’s CiteReader technology, built with ITX Corp., has extracted over 9 million references and over 9 million footnotes, and matched over 6 million citations from our 510,000 full-text papers. As we approach the notable milestone of delivering 100 million downloads, we know that SSRN’s most important contributions to scholarship are helping researchers innovate faster, and provide Open Access and enhanced discovery of new results for the world.Our development team has been busy this year. We recently released the ability to View a PDF in the Browser; simplifying access and opening up a host of capabilities for readers and mobile users. Over the next few months, we will release the following improvements to SSRN: 1) Advanced Search for SSRN’s eLibrary (which will allow users to filter by subject network in addition to search term, author name and paper date); 2) allow authors to upload a photo and CV to their SSRN Author Pages; 3) greatly improve the ability to find and select a co-author during the submission process; and 4) create comprehensive Organization Home Pages that present a summary of individual organizations’ activity on SSRN with easy access to their authors, papers, metrics, Research Paper Series, Conferences, and rankings.

We’ve spent significant resources over the past year strengthening the reliability and scalability of our technological systems. We will continue with that work over the next year, while also releasing new user features that improve the discovery and organization of scholarly research.

Our mid-year distribution break is scheduled for Monday, 29 June 2015 through Sunday, 12 July 2015. During the break, SSRN’s abstracting eJournals will not be distributed so that we can expand the capacity and improve the performance of our servers. We will continue to provide support for downloads, submissions, and subscriptions but there may be short periods of time during the break when the site is unavailable.

For any requests during the break, please contact customer support at SSRNSupport@SSRN.com or call toll free 877-SSRNHelp (877-777-6435). Outside of the United States, call +1 585 442 8170. We are available Monday through Friday between 8:30AM and 6:00PM, United States Eastern time.

We are always interested in your feedback about SSRN and our team loves to hear stories about how SSRN has impacted your life. Please contact me at Gregg_Gordon@SSRN.com or use our “Feedback to SSRN” link on most SSRN web pages.

Thank you for your continued support!

Gregg Gordon