As I step into the role of Director at SSRN, I am both honoured and excited to lead an organisation that has played such a transformative role in scholarly communication.
For more than 30 years, SSRN has helped researchers share their work, discover new ideas, and accelerate the exchange of knowledge across disciplines. What began as a pioneering platform for the social sciences has grown into one of the world’s largest cross-disciplinary preprint server, supporting researchers and institutions across the globe.
As I take on this role, one thing is clear: SSRN’s mission has never been more important.
The way research is communicated continues to evolve. Researchers increasingly need trusted platforms that enable them to share findings quickly, establish priority, receive feedback, and reach the widest possible audience. At the same time, the scholarly community rightly expects high standards of quality, integrity, transparency, and service.
At SSRN, we believe these goals go hand-in-hand.
Our ambition is not simply to maintain what SSRN has already achieved, but to build the world’s most trusted and effective preprint platform. We want researchers to choose SSRN because it offers the right balance of speed, quality, integrity, and visibility. We want to make research available faster, while continuing to meet the expectations of researchers, institutions, funders, publishers, and the broader scholarly community.
While recent changes across the research landscape have created new challenges and opportunities, our purpose remains constant. We are aware of the value we provide to researchers, and the important role we play within the broader ecosystem of scholarly communication.
Looking ahead, I am optimistic about what we can achieve. SSRN already serves as a trusted home for millions of researchers and scholarly works. The opportunity now is to build on those strong foundations, to continue improving the researcher experience, strengthen trust in preprints, and ensure that important discoveries can be shared, discovered, and built upon more quickly than ever before.
The future of research communication will be defined by collaboration, openness, innovation, and trust. SSRN is uniquely positioned to contribute to that future, and I am excited to work alongside our authors, partners, institutions, and research communities as we enter this next chapter.
Together, we can continue advancing our mission of helping researchers share tomorrow’s research today.
Clare Stone
Director, SSRN