The Volokh Conspiracy

It doesn't sound like SSRN has done anything that "cuts against open access." They've done several things that make their service more annoying but the only thing that's plausibly a cut against open access was the denial of anonymous downloads which was restored.

I think Mr. Grimmelmann underestimates that values of download counts. Download counts are much like counts of references to an article, sure people care about them for prestige but they also give useful information about what is and isn't important. If they also record information like where the downloader came to the page from and similar stuff it might be even more useful.

The little SSRN URL on the side of the page has nothing to do with open access at all. It's just an aesthetic and procedural annoyance. I can certainly understand why you might not want to use SSRN as a result but it's hardly a reason for anything like a boycott. In fact I don't see what the problem is with putting a paper up on SSRN and another somewhere else. Sure people will go to the SSRN URL if they want another copy (of a paper they are already looking at) but so what? Is the annoyance of having to update your paper at SSRN really work the loss of readers and annoyance to readers to find papers at wherever else you decide to use. Couldn't you put your own URL in the paper in addition?

Finally I think Mr. Grimmelmann discounts the value of having more papers in one place. SSRN has a certain critical mass making it much easier to navigate from one paper to another. Boycotting SSRN will do far more to hurt open access, or at least the usefulness of that access, than anything SSRN has done.

The for profit nature of SSRN is a bit worrisome. Hopefully the terms that allow them to serve your paper require that it be freely accessible but I doubt it. It would be a shame if they got a huge batch of the academic papers available online and then decided to make people subscribe to see them. Even if they were all republished elsewhere the critical mass of papers at SSRN is valuable. But maybe we should be more worried about them just going bankrupt.

My take on scholarship is in one sense a fairly traditional one. Sure, download and citation counts are a fun parlor game--my book has been reviewed twelve times, and yours only four!--but they're not really central to the core scholarly enterprise of reading, thinking, and writing. Raw downloads are a poor proxy for thought. I don't object to collecting them, but that changes when collecting them starts inhibiting real scholarly values like openness.

The URL is dangerous because a URL in a downloaded paper may well outlive the site it points to--ot it may outlive the desire to promote that site. If a few hundred copies of a paper are downloaded from SSRN, and then SSRN changes its URLs, or worse, disappears entirely, those papers (and any copies of them passed on) are still branded with misleading URLs. Worse, if SSRN does something actively bad--perhaps switching to a complete paywall for everything--they're now still floating around advertising a Bad download site when there are Good alternatives. They create a (light) form of lock-in and reduce SSRN's future incentives to behave ethically and helpfully.

And as for critical mass, in the age of search engines, it's relevant only when thinking about the economies of scale of posting papers. SSRN does make it cheaper to put papers online, but not by all that much--it's pretty easy to get online these days. (Indeed, SSRN's overhead for posting is quite significant. If you've gone through the process of putting something on your own homepage, of posting it to BEPress, and of posting it to SSRN, the first two of these are easy and the third is not.) It's much easier simply to dump everything online and let the search engines sort it all out. In this, BEPress is again in the lead, since it makes the full-text contents of the papers it hosts generally accessible to search engines. Concentration for concentration's sake just builds up worrisome concentrations of power in the intermediaries.

I hope SSRN improves. The cause is a good one. But there are better ways than the ones they are currently promoting.

Perhaps academic law should start its own arXiv. For more information read the official description and the one at wikipedia. To make this more sexy you can go back to the original url.

Do download counts always have a connection with useful scholarship? Don't "fluff" articles tend to have high download rates because they're of general interest, are linked from blogs for the entertainment aspect, but offer minimal contribution to the advancement of legal scholarship?

Just be glad that SSRN is still free.

Actually, SSRN charges universities very high fees. It's free to download for users, but the subscription fees make it very costly for academic institutions.

I also can't say I understand why a university would purchase a high-priced SSRN subscription when regular non-paying users can access SSRN's content for free. Can someone fill the rest of us in on this important piece of information that us non-profs aren't familiar with?

Wow, that certainly is obnoxious. But very odd that it shows up on some papers and not others. Here are some that don't have it (or at least didn't when I checked earlier today:

http://papers.ssrn.com/sol3/papers.cfm?abstract_id=868824

http://papers.ssrn.com/sol3/papers.cfm?abstract_id=898013
http://papers.ssrn.com/sol3/papers.cfm?abstract_id=881378
http://papers.ssrn.com/sol3/papers.cfm?abstract_id=946852

Watermarking every page is dangerous when there's any possibility that the same document might be hosted somewhere else. Then you'd have a download watermarked with the wrong URL. Better to slap the URL on every page as you print, no?