SSRN delivered its 50,000,000 full-text download!

On 12/26/11 a major milestone occurred when Jan Bena, UBC Professor downloaded “Economic Nationalism in Mergers & Acquisitions“ by Isil Erel and Serdar Dinc. It was the 50 millionth full text PDF delivered from the SSRN eLibrary. Congratulate Jan if you see him because he will receive free subscriptions to all the SSRN eJournals for life!

The SSRN eLibrary currently has 375,000 paper abstracts from over 175,000 authors and has received 60,000 new submissions during the year. SSRN’s Citereader project with ITX Corp. has extracted 7.4 million references, 4.7 million citations, and 7.7 million footnotes from our 306,000 full text papers.

SSRN’s CEO, Gregg Gordon is headed to the AFA 2012 Chicago Meeting and will congratulate Jan personally. Thank you all for making this possible.

There are a lot of people changing the world of scholarly communications and I’m looking forward to the 2011 JISC Geospatial Innovation Meeting (Joint Information Systems Committee) at Ravensborough College and Online Information 2011 at the Olympia Exhibition Center. Both of these meetings will highlight important new ways to use data and other tools to create innovative research.

Gregg Gordon is available to connect during either conference,  send us a message.

Open Access Week, now entering its fifth year, is just around the corner. It is a global event which promotes the benefits of open access publishing via free, immediate and online access of scholarly research (#OAW2011).

I will be celebrating the week by speaking at MIT on 10/26. I will discuss how scholarly communications has changed in recent years and the need for article level metrics to help identify what we don’t know, we don’t know.

My presentation, The Scholarly Communication Collider, will also explore how bringing together the right content, in the right place at the right time, helps create scholarly research.

Members of the MIT community are welcome to attend, Wednesday, October 26 from 11:30-12:30 in 3-270.

Kirby Ferguson is a quirky New York-based filmmaker with an interesting idea. He wanted to show copying was often part of the creative process by providing popular examples of remixed content. The research and examples from different types of media have been aggregated into an extremely well done, short video series titled Everything Is a Remix. Since I’ve blogged about plagiarism and Open Access in the past, a few people recommended the series to me and it got me thinking about scholarly research in a new and different way.

In the first of the (very soon to be) four videos, he jumps in with recognizable audio examples from Led Zeppelin in the 60′s to Sugar Hill in the 70′s. Sugar Hill’s early example of “sampling” a base line from Chic’s “Goodtimes” has been remixed dozens of times since then. Kirby suggests that remix techniques (collecting material, combining, transforming, and distributing) are the same ones used in any other creative process. In effect, he argues, everything is a remix.

This was an eye opening perspective for me.

I immediately drew several correlations between Kirby’s premise and what I have been seeing and speaking about over the last few years. The SSRN eLibrary provides simple, easy, Open Access to scholarly research in a way that wasn’t previously possible. And, this new level of access allows researchers to remix different perspectives from different disciplines into new innovative research.

My simple definition of innovation is

the ability to create new things by being exposed to broader and deeper set of existing things.

One of the core ideas behind SSRN is that scholarly research relies on previous research to identify new problems, develop solutions to problems, or empirically test those solutions. We created CiteReader and continue to update it so that readers can easily go backwards and forwards through the scholarly literature.  We provide tomorrow’s research today so that it can be used to create new, innovative research faster.

Larry Lessig, Director of the Edmond J. Safra Center for Ethics, Harvard Law School Professor and former SSRN Editor, discusses remix from another perspective in his TED talk about copyright laws choking creativity and finding a balance. His concern is limiting creativity and innovation by constraining how content can be used.

The question of whether remixing content is part of the creative process or stealing someone else’s work is a very interesting topic that we will continue to explore in the future, but I think Carl Sagan probably summed it up best:

If you wish to make an apple pie from scratch, you must first invent the universe.

I’m flying to Berlin, Germany this weekend for the third international PKP Scholarly Publishing Conference (#pkp2011) and looking forward to presenting on SSRN’s Open Access approach and the benefits of article level metrics.  The PKP conference attendees are a broad group of publishers and others interested in Open Source software, new publishing models and providing greater access to scholarly research.

PKP developed the Open Journal Systems (OJS), an Open Source journal management and publishing system, to expand and improve access to research.  There are over 7500 journals using OJS.

If you are attending the conference or want to meet in Berlin to talk about SSRN or scholarly research in general send me a message.

SSRN recently released our Purchase Bound Hard Copy Service. Authors and readers can now order printed copies of select papers in the SSRN eLibrary, which provides another format for users to access research papers.

The reader will receive a black and white printed and “perfect bound” copy of the PDF document with a glossy color cover. The cover includes the title of the paper, and the authors with their affiliations. Additional details about the service, including details on which papers are eligible, are available on our FAQ.

Users of the service include authors sharing their research with friends and colleagues, conferences providing hard copies of proceedings, and consultants giving research to clients and prospective clients. We invite you to try this new service and share your experience with us.

This week I’m attending the JCDL 2011 (ACM/IEEE Joint Conference on Digital Libraries) in Ottawa, Canada and presenting during the Thinking Back and Looking Forward session of the Disciplinary Repositories Workshop.  This year’s theme is “Digital Libraries: Bringing Together Scholars, Scholarship and Research Data” and our workshop will give anyone the chance to see how disciplinary repositories really work.  This is your chance to ask real questions to real people that are running real DRs.  Here is a list of presenters.

If you too are attending and would like to meetup, send me a message.

I’m looking forward to delivering the keynote, Searching and Accessing the Right Content, in the Right Place at the Right Time, tonight at the Searle Center’s Second Annual Conference on Internet Search and Innovation at Northwestern Law School.  The Searle Center runs several conferences each year related to the impact of laws and regulations on economic growth.  Professor Daniel F. Spulber, Research Director of the Searle Center, has put together an impressive group of presenters (PDF Agenda) that I’m looking to forward to hearing.

If you’re at the Conference or around Northwestern today or tomorrow, please stop by to say hello.

Michael C. Jensen, SSRN‘s Chairman and Professor Emeritus gave the commencement address to the graduating class of Georgetown University’s McDonough School of Business on Saturday May 21.

Jensen spoke to the class about integrity, authenticity and being committed to something bigger than oneself – topics drawn from work with his co-author, Werner Erhard .

Jensen explains that integrity is a matter of one’s word – nothing more, nothing less.  Both personal and organizational integrity, he said, lead to high performance and trust.

Full video here, Jensen begins at about 10 minutes in.

During the commencement, the university also awarded Jensen an honorary Doctor of Humane Letters, honoris causa.

If you haven’t seen Mike talk previously, I encourage you watch his address.  His research has had an incredible impact on me both personally and professionally.  Thanks Mike!