We’ve just started an experiment that looks at providing authors with the ability to submit their paper directly to an Elsevier Journal at the end of their submission journey on SSRN.

Within this path, authors are provided with a ‘Submit to Elsevier Journal’ button on submission completion, with an explanation of the process. If selected, they will be taken to Journal Finder where they can then enter their paper title and abstract to be matched to relevant Elsevier Journals, with the ability to submit their paper to one of these options:

Shirley Decker-Iucke, our Director of Content and business champion for this project, says:
“At SSRN we are always looking for ways to help researchers. Since we know that many of the researchers who post their preprints on SSRN ultimately intend to publish their work with a journal, we are trialing this new service that provides matches between the preprint and relevant journals welcoming papers in their field. I’m really excited about this pilot and can’t wait to see what sort of researcher community engagement we see.”

This pilot follows some recent customer research where we discovered that 70% of submitting authors would be interested in this option. If this first experiment proves popular, we’ll then be able to dedicate time to improving the User Experience by taking actions such as pre-populating the paper title and abstract, to make the process easier for those submitting.

We look forward to seeing what the take-up is like!