We are aware that Professor Bainbridge raises understandable concerns about changes at SSRN, particularly given how central the platform is to legal scholarship. For many of us, SSRN is not just a repository; it is the backbone of early dissemination, discovery, and intellectual exchange in the legal academy.
That said, it is important to emphasize that SSRN’s core mission remains unchanged: enabling the rapid sharing and discovery of scholarly work. SSRN continues to operate as an open-access platform designed specifically to help scholars disseminate early-stage research widely and efficiently.
Recent and planned updates should be understood in that context. SSRN has explicitly reaffirmed a “renewed focus on our core research sharing mission,” emphasizing preprints, working papers, and global scholarly connection as its central priorities. Far from retreating from academic support, we are re-centering on what legal scholars value most: visibility, speed, and reach.
For legal academics in particular, SSRN’s Legal Scholarship Network remains a robust and highly active ecosystem. It continues to:
- Provide a venue for posting draft articles, accepted papers, and teaching materials
- Cooperate with Google Scholar so that posted papers are rapidly indexed and widely discoverable via popular search paths
- Enable rapid dissemination to a global audience without paywalls
- Power discovery through the Legal Scholarship Network and email alerts
- Facilitate interdisciplinary visibility and citation-building
- Permit early drafts to meaningfully influence ongoing policy debates and judicial discourse
We would like to clarify a few specific points raised by Professor Bainbridge:
- Institutional research paper series will be closed on a rolling basis at the end of each institution’s existing term, or at the end of December 2026, whichever comes first.
- Published work in legal scholarship will continue to be posted in most cases, except where prohibited by copyright, as we have done in the past.
- While SSRN will introduce the ability to select a CC-BY license at submission later this year, options will include CC-BY, CC-BY-NC and CC-BY-NC-ND, providing additional flexibility and choice for authors. Additionally, authors may opt out of applying a CC license.
- SSRN will continue to highlight specific papers on its social media channels and engage with authors via our blog interview series.
- Metrics such as downloads and views will continue to be aggregated at the paper and author level, although institutional level aggregation will end this year. We will consider improved institutional discovery and aggregation features in the future product roadmap.
- With the exception of some sponsored niche areas, existing areas of legal scholarship on the site and their associated email alerts will continue unchanged.
- We are aware that many legal scholars rely on the help of their law librarians and/or department administrative support to submit research to SSRN. We are evaluating ways to balance this need in the future with the need to ring-fence the platform against bad actors and spam submissions. This will likely involve additional identity verification measures. We expect to be able to share additional details on this point in Q4 of 2026.
Change in platform strategy understandably creates uncertainty; we at SSRN are grappling with change and uncertainty along with our disciplinary communities. But SSRN is not moving away from legal scholarship; rather, we hope to continue serving as the primary hub for sharing and discovering legal research by focusing on our strengths rather than peripheral offerings. Please continue to share your thoughts and concerns with us and thank you for your patience as we grow into the future.