On Thursday, October 6, Michael Wolfe will be the guest presenter for the American Library Association’s monthly CopyTalk webinar. The topic will be “SSRN: Another Enclosure of the Commons?”
Authors Alliance has been scrutinizing the changes at the Social Science Research Network (SSRN), the academic paper preprint server that was recently acquired by Elsevier. Our concerns about continued open access to scholarship and research at SSRN prompted us to submit a list of principles to both SSRN and Elsevier, with the goal of safeguarding authors’ rights. Since then, reports of takedowns and other changes have led us to the conclusion that authors should seriously consider whether to leave SSRN in favor of other preprint archives, such as SocArXiv.
The webinar will take place at 2:00 PM Eastern. For more information and to register, visit the CopyTalk event page. We hope you’ll join in for this important discussion at the intersection of copyright, open access, and scholarship.