[GOAL] SocArXiv debuts, as SSRN acquisition comes under scrutiny

[Éric Archambault]

This type of venue is essential and certainly welcomed for the social sciences. Yet, it would be even greater a place if it also included the humanities and the arts. There is a considerable challenge in the SSH&A because there are far fewer authors on average on scholarly papers (1 to 2 authors on average) compared to the natural sciences (5 authors on average) and the health sciences (6 co-authors on average on papers). This means each social scientist and humanities scholar has considerably more work to make papers available in OA. Whereas authors in the natural sciences can afford to self-archive only 20% of the papers on average to have all the material available in OA, in the humanities, because of the sole authorship common in this domain of scholarly activity, 100% of the papers have to be self-archived. The level of effort is somewhat mitigated by the fact that output is commensurably reduced (as all the work of writing papers falls to a single person, rather than to a fifth or a sixth of a person). Still, the easier it is to archive, the more likely SSH&A scholars will be likely to self-archive. Would be nice if SocArXiv became a more inclusive AHSocArxiv. We have enough of the incoherent inclusion policies of arXiv, inclusiveness should be celebrated in OA - we should no longer be divided and conquered.
Éric

Eric Archambault, Ph.D.
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From: goal-bounces at eprints.org [mailto:goal-bounces at eprints.org] On Behalf Of Richard Poynder
Sent: July 19, 2016 11:01 AM
To: goal at eprints.org
Subject: [GOAL] SocArXiv debuts, as SSRN acquisition comes under scrutiny

The arrival of a new preprint server for the social sciences called SocArXiv comes just a month after news that Elsevier is acquiring the Social Science Research Network (SSRN), a preprint repository and online community founded in 1994 by two researchers.

Given the concern and disappointment expressed over the SSRN purchase by researchers, it is no surprise that the launch of SocArXiv has been very well received. Still smarting from Elsevier's 2013 acquisition of Mendeley - another formerly independent service for managing and sharing scholarly papers - many (especially OA advocates) were appalled to hear that the publisher has bought a second OA asset. The reasons for this were encapsulated in a blog post by University of Iowa law professor Paul Gowder entitled "SSRN has been captured by the enemy of open knowledge".

This concern has also attracted the attention of the Federal Trade Commission (FTC) which has launched a review of the SSRN purchase. The FTC is currently contacting many institutions and experts in scholarly publishing to assess the implications of the acquisition, presumably in order to decide whether it needs to intervene in some way.

Elsevier is understandably keen to downplay the interest the US government is showing in its latest acquisition. "The Federal Trade Commission is conducting a routine, informal review of our acquisition of the Social Sciences Research network," vice president and head of global corporate relations at Elsevier Tom Reller emailed me. "Elsevier's interest in SSRN is and has been about SSRNs' ethos, a place where it is free to upload, and free to download. We are working cooperatively with the FTC, and believe that the review will conclude favourably."

In other words, Elsevier does not believe the FTC's interest in its purchase will lead to a formal investigation.

But however timely SocArXiv's launch may be, the service is not a response to the SSRN acquisition, the director of the new service, and professor of sociology at the University of Maryland, Philip Cohen assured me. "We were already in planning before we heard about the SSRN purchase."

More here: http://poynder.blogspot.co.uk/2016/07/socarxiv-debuts-as-ssrn-acquisition.html


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