VIP reviews Social Sciences Research Network
Jinfo Blog

9th February 2009

By Joanna Ptolomey

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The academic and corporate sectors don’t think they’re very much alike. However they both need creative and innovative working environments to perform well and survive. But until fairly recently they were on parallel roads, and ‘never the twain shall meet’. Now an organisation called the Social Sciences Research Network (http://www.ssrn.com/) is starting to receive attention from the wider commercial community, which is interested in the content and models of dissemination that are emerging from it. Contrary to the image of the crusty academic community, the peer review process makes for a highly competitive and cut-throat business – one that sounds more like the corporate sector. Here, ‘publish or perish’ is not a team-building sport and careers can be made or broken. But it has also created essentially a closed world, reducing access to worthy and valuable research and adding lengthy time delays for knowledge entering the wider arena. In some cases, a peer-reviewed article can have a journey of some two years to publication, and my own recent author experience for a peer review journal took nearly ten months. No one doubts the rigour of the peer review system, but it calls into question the currency and inclusiveness of the content. What makes SSRN (reviewed in VIP 62 http://web.vivavip.com/go/vip/62) exciting and interesting is that it works in parallel with the traditional academic peer-reviewed system, but goes for rapid dissemination and social inclusion. It argues that the working paper – either as a ‘raw peer reviewed article’ or ‘just ideas and arguments’ – should be circulated to a wider community. The wider community, including the business and corporate sector, is starting to take notice. As an experienced researcher and information professional, getting access to content (intelligence) from the academic sector in the past could be costly, hard to find and, in some cases, considered unsuitable and not very digestible. However, we have always known that some of the best information and people were to be found in the academic sector. SSRN allows scholars to have a more user-friendly platform for feedback and review, and lets the wider community not only access this information but join this co-operative. This cross pollination of ideas and feedback via the SSRN networks is very much what the folks at SSRN want. The question is whether SSRN represents a better and more accurate version of how academic content can make a difference and add value in a much broader setting. SSRN certainly challenges us to consider the possibilities of this new model in terms of relevancy and accessibility. In this information-driven economy, perhaps we need to give further attention to how we view, disseminate, use and assess the value of academic content.

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