(17 May 2016, London) Elsevier has acquired the Social Science Research Network (SSRN). Founded in 1994, SSRN is a Rochester, NY-based scholarly research preprint repository and online community. SSRN will be further developed alongside Mendeley, a London-based free reference manager and scholarly collaboration network owned by Elsevier.
SSRN members will benefit from the Mendeley technology platform, its scholarly collaboration network, a leading reference manager and other personal library management tools. Additionally, SSRN members will benefit from access to Mendeley’s researcher professional profile capabilities, person to person network communications and “follow” capabilities. For Elsevier and Mendeley, adding SSRN accelerates its social community strategy, bringsopportunities forenhanced author relationships, and provides access to a leading resource for content.
“Our goal is to further enhance engagement within and around a SSRN member’s academic work, while still providing the same core services that our members value and expect,” said Gregg Gordon, President and CEO, SSRN. “Mendeley has thrived since obtaining the support of the world’s largest science publisher, and now we will be able to offer broader services that more deeply integrate into the workflows of all parties in the social network of science. Most importantly, we will continue our core mission of providing researchers with free submissions and free downloads.”
Researchers and institutions are under increasing pressure to demonstrate research output, lay early claim to intellectual work, generate visibility and discourse, and monitor the impact of their work. SSRN provides the scholarly environment to enable this process around preprint work (a preprint is an article that has not yet undergone peer review). Now, Mendeley and Elsevier can help close the loop from research collaboration and preprint feedback to broad dissemination while providing to SSRN members authoritative performance measurement tools powered by Scopus, Newsflo (global media mentions) and other sources.
“SSRN has established a solid network in Social Science domains, sharing working papers and showcasing researchers and institutions,” said Jan Reichelt, Co-Founder and Managing Director, Mendeley. “Together we can provide greater access to a growing user-generated content base on which we can build new tools and increase engagement between researchers and their papers. We intend to scale and maximize SSRN in ways that benefit authors, institutions and the entire scientific ecosystem.”
SSRN’s Chairman, CEO and other employees will remain with the company, and SSRN will retain its freemium model, with content ‘free to submit, and free to download’ for its users. More information about this announcement can be found on Elsevier’s online community and information site, Elsevier Connect. Financial terms are not being disclosed.
The announcement in full is here.
