I am humbled and excited to take on the role of Managing Director at SSRN, and I would like to recognize our founders, including Michael C. Jensen, Natalie Jensen and Gregg Gordon, as well as the many other hardworking team members for all they have done to build SSRN into the amazing platform it is now. It’s a privilege to work with the SSRN team to move SSRN on to its next chapter. 

SSRN is now the largest and most active cross disciplinary preprint server in the world. We have 1.3 million papers on our site, entrusted to us by 1.8 million authors, and we have helped readers find and download that research 41 million times in the last 12 months. We help scholarship move broadly, so that it can help other researchers and the general population. We want to enable people to address some of the most important problems facing humanity by continuing to provide tomorrow’s research today. 

Since SSRN joined with Elsevier, we have grown the volume of the research we host from 7,000 papers a month to 16,000 papers a month, and we have grown the breadth of the disciplines we serve from the social sciences and humanities to also include medicine, physics, the life sciences and pretty much everything under the sun. SSRN is also the only preprint server that has figured out a successful commercial model, and our Research Papers Series  and other commercial products deliver a unique value proposition for organizations who want to showcase their research and ideas to our global audience. 

We are a strong business with a strong partner, working with Elsevier to develop benefits for the broader research community, to support the researcher at all stages of their workflow, and to explore the best way to serve the needs of the scholarly communication world.  Our partnership with Elsevier journals now results in over 12,000 new preprints a month, and we link preprints on SSRN to their published versions of record on Science Direct, ensuring researchers can get the version of the paper they need.  We’ve also worked with Scopus to ensure that preprints are included on Scopus author pages and are afforded the recognition they deserve. 

We at SSRN will continue to execute on our current strategy and goals, while looking for new ways to do things even better. Our top priority remains to expand our service to the scholarly community and to be the best early-stage research and preprint platform on the planet.

If you’d like to share your thoughts on SSRN, or just reach out to connect with me, I’d love to hear from you at ideas@ssrn.com.