SSRN sold to Elsevier | Hacker News Reader

SSRN sold to Elsevier

professorbainbridge.com

212 pointskristianc47 comments

Why is this not subject to anti-trust review?

Oh, interesting. Among the trustees is Hal Varian, professor emeritus of economics, UC Berkeley. And currently Google's Chief Economist:

http://info.berkeley.edu/~hal/

http://www.ssrn.com/en/

Brian Leiter's take: http://leiterlawschool.typepad.com/leiter/2016/05/elsevier-a...

He points to Matt Bodie who has this comment:

"In 2006, I asked Gregg Gordon if SSRN would ever sell itself to a larger corporation. His answer:

"'As for a future sale, other than myself, the shareholders are academics. They have invested their own money and time into SSRN with the goal of changing how research is distributed, value their reputations and relationships within the scholarly community, and would not risk them by selling in a manner that would jeopardize our central goal. Our intention is to never sell, but it is hard to guarantee that.'"

http://www.theconglomerate.org/2016/05/ssrn-acquired-by-else...

Paul Gowder, professor of law & political science, why you should be concerned:

https://medium.com/@PaulGowder/ssrn-has-been-captured-by-the...

>with the goal of changing how research is distributed

Services like Arxiv, and now scihub have changed things up more than a bit. I have to wonder if they saw the writing on the wall and cashed out while they could (and I would not fault them if they said they did)

This seems quite plausible. SSRN has been a good thing, but over many years it hasn't managed anywhere near the change and furor produced by Scihub. If open access brands are going to be devalued by universal access, then it's a great time to sell.

SSRN has worked within the system.

Sci-Hub (and Aaron) said "fuck the system".

Ain't no power like the power of money because the power of money don't stop.

It is really the fault of you, the reader, because somehow your library finds $2M a year to pay to Elsevier and can't find a dime to pay for open access.

It is a little known story, but in the mid 0's, arXiv came within a hair of being sold to IoP by the Cornell University Library.

> It is a little known story, but in the mid 0's, arXiv came within a hair of being sold to IoP by the Cornell University Library. ¶ Source?

Me. I stopped it from happening and got fired.

This deserves a blog post.

Maybe.

Everybody involved got fired, all the way to the then head of the CUL.

I haven't talked about it much because whistleblowers just get nailed to the wall. The only kind of settlement that is worth it is enough money you never have to work again and can live high on the hog.

Would Paul Ginsparg vouch for your story?

Try it.

I don't understand. I don't know Paul that well, but I'd consider him a friend. Are you critical of him? Would he roughly agree with your take?

Truly, the only solution to these pricks will be a LOT more people like Alexandra Elbakyan.

And Aaron Swartz.

Hopefully like him, but not with that ending.

"They say you die twice. One time when you stop breathing and a second time, a bit later on, when somebody says your name for the last time.".

That was not even close to the ending of Aaron Swartz.

A good point, I chose my words poorly.

You did fine. I hugely appreciate what Aaron did. I wouldn't want to see what happened to him occur again in the name of Open Access, and I'm hoping it doesn't.

But yes, keeping his name and cause alive would be a Very Good Thing.

It will happened again, nothing has changed; if anything, things are getting worse, not better.

Spreading the gospel of Open Access sounds strange today, but someday, in the future, it just will be.

I like to think about what how people in some hypothetical future might view us, in broad strokes at least. What will they look at us, aghast, the way we look at rampant lice, or heating a curling iron (that was actually IRON!) over a fire? Along with the fact that most of us take our lives and health into our hands daily in cards, I suspect that the lack of Open Access, the role of money in our science and medicine, will be up there too.

Government regulation in the form of trust busting is another legal solution.

I can't imagine our government doing that, or any incarnation of our government we're likely to see in our lives.

To give a recent example, in 2013, federal courts ruled that Apple violated antitrust laws by fixing ebook prices, forcing them to pay nearly half a billion dollars.

I mean... that's never something a business wants to have do, but half a billion is something they could pay out of cash, with many MANY billions (just in cash) left over. I'm not seeing a solution there, just a symbolic victory.

https://act.eff.org/action/publicly-funded-research-should-b...

Yes a lot more heroes like Alexandra Elbakyan, but also people willing to send a bit of monetary support.

I'll be sending $200 worth of bitcoin as a donation. Please consider donating $10 or $20 to Scihub to help them expand.

http://sci-hub.cc/

I think sci-hub is wonderful. However even widespread adoption by students and academics won't necessarily cut into publishers profits.

"Gold Open Access" and so-called hybrid journals will still make money off academics who have to publish in them for status / tenure / just to get a job.

Elsevier etc could transition to make all their money off author / grant agency / institution pays type charges.

The solution[s] to this are things like Green OA journals, library led publishing projects like 'Open Library of Humanities' [1] and piracy / liberation at the point of consumption.

https://www.openlibhums.org/

If Elsevier can find a way to provide open access and still make money, more power to them.

I think, basically, "free the science from the publishers" and "free the scientists from the publishers" are two different goals and it's totally fine if sci-hub only fixes the first one.

Why was the title of this changed? It may have been editorialized but it wasn't misleading or clickbait by any means.

'worst legacy publisher' is not exactly a neutral fact.

But the HN guidelines say "No editorializing". We aren't allowed to "fix" blatantly bad headlines, so it's pretty hypocritical of the powers that be to "sanitize" this one (if that's what happened).

I think the sanitisation of the headline is in keeping with the spirit of the following guidelines:

If the original title begins with a number or number + gratuitous adjective, we'd appreciate it if you'd crop it. E.g. translate "10 Ways To Do X" to "How To Do X," and "14 Amazing Ys" to "Ys." Exception: when the number is meaningful, e.g. "The 5 Platonic Solids."

Otherwise please use the original title, unless it is misleading or linkbait.

Furthermore, the full title as displayed on the article "SSRN sold to Elsevier: From open access to the worst legacy publisher" is actually a main title and subtitle, as noted by the colon separating them.

It's quite common on HN for the subtitle to not be included in the submission's title, or for it to be used instead of the main title.

I think the sanitisation of the headline is in keeping with the spirit of the following guidelines:

Yep, it's just not consistent with the actual observed practices here. In reality, if a submitter "fixes" a bad headline, it almost always gets reverted to the exact title of the original post, no more, no less. But on this occasion, somebody submitted the exact original headline, and it got "sanitized" for no apparent reason.

The frustrating part isn't the guideline, it's the inconsistent application of the guideline.

I should have changed my post to reflect that I think my second argument is the stronger.

The subtitle was removed, and I have seen this as common practice (choosing either main or subtitle) in the past - though typically by the submitter.

My first point is more that this does not fly in the face of the guidelines, even if it is not common practice.

The reversion to the original headline happens automatically. There's no inconsistency, it's just that only mods are allowed to change the headline

That's the second title Ibe seen get sanitized in the past few days and I have only skimmed hacker news in that time

Actually, it wasn't editorialized at all and was submitted exactly verbatim. I saw the full title on HN minutes after it was submitted, which for some reason now has been chopped. Guessing not by the submitter, because it also happened on the Apple "assassins" headline from someone else around the same time (submitted full, edited down). Nobody has noticed in that thread yet.

Both edits alter the tone. The other one is altered dramatically, this one less so.

I can recall dozens of instances of this happening, for what it's worth. It's just another one of those HN guidelines to shrug about and struggle to explain, and enough people have asked for transparency on this over the years that you'll probably never see it.

In my experience, titles that are seen as clickbait or overly editorial are often edited. I suspect that the first order problem is seen as clickbait/editorializing and verbatim use a lesser given the relevance of titles to the HN front page.

Funny, people seemed to have used the site because it was owned by academics, e.g. http://kennethcwilbur.com/whyssrn.html

> Since SSRN is owned by academics, I expect it will continue offering similar services for the foreseeable future.

BTW: Did SSRN had a official method of downloading their metadata?

I have images of those tales told about how GM purchased the LA streetcars only to destroy them running through my head. What terrible news.

Title on the site: "SSRN sold to Elsevier: From open access to the worst legacy publisher"

This would be the right time for arXiv to start accepting quantitative social science papers. Most papers at SSRN fall under that label. My guess is that most authors would happily move their papers from SSRN to arXiv in the blink of an eye.

Does SSRN come with any guarantee of peer review or minimum quality threshold? The only downside with arXiv is that anything can be posted. It works fine as a paper-hosting service but is terrible as a "social proof that my paper is OK". If SSRN comes along with such a reputation, then it might be a hard transition.

However if SSRN is just a paper-hosting service, then everyone should move to the arXiv immediately.

SSRN posts anything (no peer review). It has the same function as arXiv.

The only issue I see with moving to arXiv right now is that currently arXiv only accepts papers on topics such as physics, math, and CS. For arXiv to be helpful to the SSRN crowd, it would need to have a few new categories (e.g., "quantitative social science", which could be split into subtopics mirroring the main topics in economics and management science journals).

Do authors assign copyright to SSRN? (If SSRN is not trying to turn a profit why would they need an assignment?)

Will Elsevier require copyright assignment?

$$RN.

Reply on news.ycombinator.com