The SSRN Blog

iSSRN, our free iPhone App, was released recently.  It provides instant access to the latest Social Science and Humanities research in the SSRN eLibrary from scholars around the world. iSSRN is available from Apple’s iTunes store.

iSSRN allows iPhone and iPod Touch users to search over 250,000 papers and read the full text of the papers directly on their device.

Note: This is an updated version of the previous iSSRN App and this version, not the previous one, will be updated in the future.

Geoff Bilder, CrossRef’s Director of Strategic Initiatives, and others discussed Trust during their CrossRef Annual Meeting presentations earlier this week and I’ll discuss more on this topic next week.  What I was most impressed with in Bilder’s talk was the list of new projects, such as TOI DOI (a DOI shortener).

I have often thought of CrossRef being a bit old school and it is great to see them sharing its cool new ideas.  Plus, they are making them available at the new CrossRef Labs.  Keep up the good work!

We recently expanded the Share functionality on the top of our abstract pages by adding Facebook and Twitter to the Digg, Delicious, and CiteULike options.  Our community asked for the ability to easily post or tweet about research that was important to them and has already created thousands of SSRN links on Facebook and Twitter.

This ease of linking and accessing content is beginning to create interesting opportunities.  Google* and Bing are continually adding features to enhance their results but it has become a cat and mouse game trying to provide the best, non-manipulated results.  We are starting to see a lot of interesting research regarding the use of social networks to provide recommendations using a “wisdom of friends” approach.  It makes a lot of sense to us.  When you think about it, don’t you value the recommendation of a trusted friend more than a search engine algorithm?

* I love the 40th Anniversary Sesame Street doodles this week, especially today’s Cookie Monster!

Do you want to know what other users that have your same interests are reading? The Social Science Research Network’s database has a “recommendation functionality” (a.k.a “People who downloaded this paper also downloaded…”) that will tell you just this.  Our recommendation function gives a user a list of papers that have been downloaded by other users. This list will appear on a public abstract page to the right of the abstract. The list contains up to 10 recommended papers that have been downloaded by other users that have also downloaded the paper on that public abstract page. This function may list more content that is relevant to our users than what is listed in just a regular search.

In 2008, SSRN released CiteReader and Reference Technology into their Beta labs. CiteReader captures references from the papers in the SSRN eLibrary. These references are then verified and linked to the cited papers in the eLibrary.

Currently, CiteReader and Reference Technology are accessible to all registered SSRN Users. Registration is free at SSRN’s User HeadQuarters. We hope to take this technology out of the Beta Lab and make it available to the entire public in 2010.

Since we introduced CiteReader and Reference technology into the Beta Lab last year, we have added over a million “Cited By” links to our already existing million links. To date, CiteReader has successfully:

If we captured and verified the references from a paper in the SSRN eLibrary, the Beta Lab Public abstract page will have a “References Tab” [References (#)] where # is the total number of references we have captured and verified on this paper. Click on the tab and the list of verified references for this paper will be listed.

CiteReader References and Citations Tabs

Similarly, if the paper has been cited by other papers in the SSRN eLibrary, there will be a second tab on the public abstract page - the “Citations Tab” [Citations (#)], where # is the total number of citations to this paper from other papers in the SSRN eLibrary.  Click on this tab, and the list of verified citations to this paper will be listed.

These two links allow SSRN users to easily examine the literature an author used to write a paper using the Reference Tab and to read new content that is citing the paper by using the Citations Tab. This quicker feedback on the use of scholarly content will definitely give scholars a trail to follow in their own research, and will perhaps even change the way we rate the use of new content in real time.

One of the biggest challenges in scholarly research today is wading through the growing mountain of content. We fully acknowledge there is an overabundance of information in scholarly research today and are working hard to make searching and sifting through the content contained in our eLibrary much easier. Since we received ~50,000 submissions last year, the SSRN Community needs a better interface to find research papers. After spending time thinking about different approaches to display large quantities of articles, we created the eLibrary Viewer.

The eLibrary Viewer places search results in the left hand column of the page. Each result displays hyper-linked title and authors, and the first few lines of the abstract. In addition, we included buttons to open the full abstract page in another window; view citations, references, and footnotes where available; add the abstract to a user’s MyBriefcase; and share, email, or download the paper. These features will allow readers to quickly review and share multiple articles without having to go back and forth between the results and the content pages. The eLibrary Viewer will reduce a researcher’s time reviewing articles. We hope you like it!

To use the new functionality, sign in to SSRN HQ and click on the Beta tab on the search page. Enter your criteria, click “Search” and then leave a comment telling us what you think of it.

Last month, we beta tested abstract “commenting” functionality on all abstracts in our Cognitive Science Network (CSN). With the initial success and positive feedback, we added the functionality to all abstracts in our Entrepreneurship Research and Policy Network (ERPN). This feature expands the possibilities and conversations based on scholarly research in the SSRN eLibrary. We will add commenting to all abstract pages later this year.

What’s next? - SSRN status updates or Super Poke - we don’t know but we are having fun.

CSN commenting Box

As part of “narrowing the distance” between authors and readers, we are beta testing “commenting” on all public abstract pages in our Cognitive Science Network.  As I said in a previous post, “…as scholarly research has moved from a model of scarcity to one of information overabundance, content is no longer king. The conversation that surrounds the content is king…” The commenting functionality launched this week allows our readers to leave comments for the author and other readers on the abstract’s web page.  We hope this functionality provides a simple forum for hundreds of conversations based on scholarly research in the SSRN eLibrary.  Commenting will be available on all public abstract pages later this year.

When I look at the SSRN Community, I am excited and motivated by the challenges and possibilities in front of us.  We need to be innovative and responsive to the changing needs of our community, but have to deal with the harsh realities of a terrible economy and limited development resources. However, I hope we use these challenges to become more innovative. My simple definition of innovation is the creation of new things by being exposed to a broader and deeper set of existing things.  Innovation is critical to SSRN’s future.  In fact, we need to be innovative about being innovative.

Tom Koulopoulos’ new book, The Innovation Zone discusses re-innovating innovation and provides “Seven Lessons of Innovation.”  Koulopoulos states the basic tenet that we all need to understand, “Invention is NOT innovation.  Innovation creates value.  Invention just creates more stuff.”  Innovating often sounds hard or based on luck, but Koulopoulos says it is achievable with some basic building blocks.

One of the challenges we currently face is providing personalization to our users. We would like to develop SSRN so that each user can obtain the content they want in a way they want. However, personalization is difficult with the broad spectrum of users we serve - from non-academics and undergraduates to some of the smartest scholars in the world, including several Nobel Laureates.  Add to this the diverse technological capabilities of our users, and the challenge of personalization becomes even greater. However, Koulopoulos views personalization as an opportunity for innovation (and I think a great opportunity for SSRN):

“Personalization is where innovation takes on a new dimension that simply has no parallel in today’s market. We may talk about ‘markets of one’ but we’ve hardly delivered on the vision. When we do, innovation will finally be driven by the market.” (Excerpt: ‘The Innovation Zone’)

We discuss innovation a lot at SSRN and I believe that we are a pretty innovative company.  Unfortunately, we will need to be extremely innovative to be successful.  Several copies of The Innovation Zone just arrived from Amazon for our development team.  I think it will help refine our process and make SSRN better for everyone.

“Brave NOW World” was the theme at the Society for Scholarly Publishing (SSP) Annual Meeting in Baltimore last week where several ideas were presented for new publishing models and technologies. Geoffrey Bilder (CrossRef) returned this year proselytizing the same model he presented at last year’s meeting. In his usual dry, in-your-face style, he revisited his “iPub” model including some of the same jokes about publishers and librarians. If one reads excerpts from last year’s meeting, it tells the same story but no where near as enjoyable as watching him present the arguments.

Bilder envisions an “iPub” searchable database for research papers similar to that of the iTunes music database. iTunes, with its “critical mass of content, simple interface,… and disaggregation of content…,” he argues, lends itself to a scholarly publishing model. He sees that a huge challenge facing researchers today is gathering research that is now available from so many different sources. “Library silos aren’t much better than publisher silos,” he comments. Bilder envisions one location for research storing, which would make it easier for researchers to find and gather data. iPub would contain many research papers from many different disciplines and provide a friendly user interface to search for this research. Much like iTunes, where many types of music are located and can be “searched” by Genre, Artist, or Title; on iPub, a user would be able to search for papers by discipline, key words, Author, Title, or Journal. Then, analogous to iTunes users creating their own music libraries and playlists, iPub users could create their own research libraries from their already existing papers on their hard drive, plus retrieved papers from iPub database. However, the one aspect of the iTunes model that Bilder views as not being compatible with the “iPub” model is cheap, simple pricing (i.e., $0.99 downloads). He believes that “iPub” would have to incorporate a system of variable pricing for monopoly pricing reasons.

Bilder says iPub would be “scary” if this envisioned system were built by someone not in scholarly publishing. But perhaps this system is already built…

During this same conference, Victor Henning, co-founder of Mendeley, presented Mendeley’s research/collaboration tool. Mendeley is based on a different music industry sharing model, Last.FM. In fact, two out of the 13 members of Mendeley’s staff were once part of Last.FM’s staff, including Stefan Glaenzer, Last.FM’s former Chairman. Mendeley’s goal is to provide a tool that “makes research social.” Mendeley provides stats about your own research library, discussions, and recommendations about research papers, and provides trends and charts about readers, authors, and titles.
So, does Mendeley have many of the qualities of the “iPub” model that Bilder envisions?

• Critical Mass of Content: Right now a researcher can “gather” papers from a number of databases - including PubMed, PLOS, and arXiv to name a few (complete list of databases that are compatible with Mendeley’s interface.) But maybe more important than the databases from which one can gather research articles is the database that Mendeley itself is currently building. In April, Mendeley had its one millionth article uploaded to the database. And in Victor’s own words:

“…we’re not hoarding all that data just because we can, no Sir! Our vision is to create the largest open, interdisciplinary and ontological database of research - as crazy as that sounds, remember that Last.fm (whose former chairman and COO are our co-founders and investors) pulled it off in the space of music within just three years, using the same user data-aggregation model that Mendeley is built on.”(One Million Articles Uploaded to Mendeley!)

• Simple Interface: Gathering research articles into one’s own personal library is very easy with Mendeley. It’s as easy as clicking on a “bookmarklet” while on the web page of the research article. However, as of right now, I do not see any search capabilities onto Mendeley’s own database for research articles, nor onto partnering databases. I am willing to bet that database search is in Mendeley’s future as a Premium service.

• Disaggregation of content: Right now, users on Mendeley are divided into 25 disciplines, including Biological Sciences and Humanities. Statistics regarding papers on Mendeley’s database and in user’s libraries can be filtered by discipline. As Mendeley’s database grows, I am sure that more granular subdisciplines will be added. It is assumed that in the future, Mendeley users will be able to search Mendeley’s database by discipline, key words, Author, Title, or Journal (or any other capturable metadata.)

Would Mendeley’s model lend itself to “cheap pricing” and “simple pricing”? When Henning was asked about how this model could generate revenue, he mentioned a few ideas including “premium services” and “site licenses”, but during his presentation he also mentioned “personalized recommendation” statistics and other services that could lend themselves to “adaptive pricing tools.”

Much conversation after this presentation was centered on “optimal pricing” for pay per download papers. The core question remains if publishers are ready to follow Bilder’s advice about pricing and pay per downloads? Perhaps other revenue models would be more feasible and have lower perceived risks for publishers.

Mendeley says that they want to make research social and I think they have a great concept, the question is whether the publishers are likely to support the concept or take a Recording Industry Association of America type stance. It is surely an exciting time in scholarly publishing …

Here is a brief overview of a few recent development projects:

•      Expanded International Content – We upgraded our database to install an expanded character set, which makes uploading of non-English content easier for our international users.

•      Duplicate Notification – With roughly 40 percent of submissions being some form of a duplicate, we created an alert system to notify submitters of possible duplicates. The system allows users to view possible duplicates and determine if they want to revise the existing document or continue to upload the new one. This will make the submission process more efficient for both submitters and SSRN staff.

•      Improved Conference Management System – We have made many improvements to CMS in the past few weeks, but some of the most notable are:

• the ability for conference organizers to track the activity of each conference submission
• expanded conference emails functionality, including direct links to sessions and the ability for organizers to see historical information regarding emails
• improved conference session level functionality including submission management and reporting