Talking Open Access with the European Research Council

I arrived to an overcast Brussels yesterday to share SSRN with the European Research Council (ERC). The ERC was established by the European Commission and it’s mission is to encourage the highest quality research in Europe through competitive funding and to support investigator-initiated frontier research across all fields of research, on the basis of scientific excellence. Today and tomorrow, they are holding a Workshop on Open Access Infrastructures in the Social Sciences and Humanities to review existing practices and discuss future possibilities.

SSRN has worked hard over the last few years to expand internationally.
First, we encouraged more scholars from more countries to submit their research by adding more granular eJournal topics and to use our Conference Management System (more on CMS in a few days).
Second, we’ve added more international editors of SSRN eJournals to provide a global perspective.
Third, we are adding non-English networks, starting with Hebrew in a few weeks.

Although we are the #1 Web Repository, I realize SSRN is not used everywhere. Whether it is the German Finance scholar who told me his work only pertains to the German financial markets or the SRM University researcher in Chennai talking about their Mumbai slums research only having value in India, SSRN needs to continue to reach out to scholars around the world and make their research accessible. It is the fastest way to share different perspectives and help scholars create innovative research faster.

I hope I can demonstrate to the ERC that SSRN can be the repository for high-quality European research.