From the Chronicle of Higher Education:
The publishing giant Elsevier announced this week that it had bought the Social Science Research Network, an online community where scholars in the humanities and social sciences freely share preprints of their academic work. You may have heard about this on social media, where much of the reaction was fierce and frustrated.
As George Siemens, a prominent innovator in education, put it on Twitter: "Weird. Kinda like 'Satan buys the Vatican.'"
The website Boing Boing offered a similarly charged metaphor: "It's like if Monsanto bought out your favorite organic farm co-op."
Here's another comparison. It might be like if Facebook bought Craigslist. Both Facebook and Craigslist are companies, but ones with very different reputations, very different business practices, and very different levels of technology. The purchase price was not disclosed.
The move is a reminder that even though Elsevier is one of the largest publishers of academic journals, it has shifted its strategy in recent years to play a more prominent role in the larger ecosystem of academic communication. A major move in that direction came in 2013, when Elsevier bought Mendeley, a service to help scholars manage their references and online documents. As Paul Foeckler, a co-founder of Mendeley, said in an interview this week, "Elsevier is becoming more of a tools-and-services company rather than a publisher."
Many scholars have long seen Elsevier as an enemy to the scholarly enterprise because it makes hefty profits from library subscriptions to journals, even though it doesn’t have to pay the authors of the research papers. And that explains the concern as Elsevier has broadened its reach.
Leaders of SSRN, as the network is known, and Elsevier insist that all the things scholars like about the online community will stay the same but that the hub will be able to update its features and better serve researchers. ...
This is from SSRN:
SSRN's objective is to provide worldwide distribution of research to authors and their readers and to facilitate communication among them at the lowest possible cost. In pursuit of this objective, we encourage authors to upload their papers to SSRN (without charge). And any paper an author uploads to SSRN is downloadable for free, worldwide. We allow publishers and other institutions to charge users for downloading papers they have uploaded to SSRN while encouraging them to charge fees that are as low as possible. Our rule is that the price for such papers on SSRN must be equal to or below the lowest price that such papers are available anywhere on the web to non-subscribers. The vast majority of papers in the SSRN eLibrary are downloadable at no charge. In addition, SSRN provides free subscriptions to all of our abstracting eJournals to users in developing countries on request.
SSRN earns revenue to cover its considerable expenses from the more than 400 institutions that outsource the distribution of their research papers to SSRN through SSRN's Research Paper Series, subscription fees for SSRN's subject matter abstracting eJournals, fees received for professional and job announcements, conference fees for SSRN's Conference Management System, and lastly from fees shared with SSRN by publishers who distribute their papers through SSRN on a pay-per-download basis.
A good guess is that these fees will rise due to market power. While that isn't quite Satanic, it is a shame since SSRN is now open to the same complaint as Elsevier (it is earning profit by exploiting the free labor of researchers).
