Publishing things on SSRN!

It turns out that anybody who wants to, can publish things on SSRN (Wikipedia article).  SSRN, it will be recalled, is an initialism for Social Science Research Network (web site).  To test this out, I created an account at SSRN and uploaded The Fool’s Errand that is DOCX.  You can see it here:  https://ssrn.com/abstract=4346907.  This blog article describes the process and the results. 

By way of background, SSRN exists as an organized and methodical way for people, typically people in academia, to provide preprints of articles to colleagues.  The goal is to provide rapid dissemination of scholarly research in many areas including the social sciences, humanities, life sciences, and health sciences.  According to the SSRN web site, as of todays date SSRN’s eLibrary provides 1,218,271 research papers from 1,133,222 researchers in more than 70 disciplines.

It is easy to think of reasons why someone might find it helpful to post a document in SSRN.

Suppose for example that a person does not have a personal blog or personal web site (which would be a usual place for a person to publish one’s own writings).  SSRN provides a stable platform and a concise citation format, and does not charge any money to individuals like you or me for its services.  Search engines crawl SSRN regularly, so a document uploaded to SSRN is likely to start showing up in search engine results promptly.

It is quite easy to do the things that I did just now to publish The Fool’s Errand That Is DOCX on SSRN.  A first step is to create an account.  Basically you follow the usual process of providing an email address, and they send you a Secret Code Number, and you use it to authenticate your email address.    Next thing you know, you have an authenticated account.  And you can start uploading documents.

I imagine that for some people, it would be helpful to save copies of documents on SSRN as a sort of “easy to find them again if I can’t recall where I had put them” as well as a sort of offsite backup.