Welcome to the new look SSRN blog. This last year there’s been so much going on at the site, and so much happening in the world of preprints and scholarly communication, that we thought it was high time we set up a regular way to communicate with the authors, researchers, institutions and customers that work with SSRN.

There’s lot of interesting research that we’d love to highlight – such as the recent paper on Russia’s economy that’s been attracting a lot of attention, which we cover here.

We also look forward to sharing some of the technical and product work we’re doing to try and improve the SSRN experience for the hundreds of thousands of people who choose to distribute their work on the SSRN platform. Our dedicated technical team based in Oxford in the UK works around the clock to keep our site online and service researchers 25/7 and we’d love to share what they’re up to.

SSRN prides itself on being a commercial platform that pays its way. Our founder Michael C. Jensen always saw SSRN as a commercial venture, and early on we started to generate revenue through hosting content from our commercial partners in our Research Papers Series, through paid alerts that allow organisations and individuals to stay up to date, and via our paid jobs and announcements.

We think it’s important that preprint server platforms such as SSRN remain commercially viable so that we can continue to provide access to research that is free to upload and free to download for the research community. We’re continuing to explore ways we can generate revenue to support our core missions, and we look forward sharing the ways in which SSRN works with our partners to add value the global research community.