From: "Jean-Claude Guédon" <[log in to unmask]>
Date: Tue, 19 Jul 2016 11:24:30 -0400

Rick Anderson is right. See http://www.ssrn.com/update/general/mjensen.html

In particular, this passage makes the revenue system of SSRN quite clear:

SSRN earns revenue to cover its considerable expenses from the more
than 400 institutions that outsource the distribution of their
research papers to SSRN through SSRN's Research Paper Series,
subscription fees for SSRN's subject matter abstracting eJournals,
fees received for professional and job announcements, conference fees
for SSRN's Conference Management System, and lastly from fees shared
with SSRN by publishers who distribute their papers through SSRN on a
pay-per-download basis.

SSRN reinvests all of the cash it receives after expenses, debt
service and dividends, to enhance our services to authors and users.
We spend in excess of $1,000,000 per year on system development and
user support.

Jean-Claude Guédon

Professeur titulaire
Littérature comparée
Université de Montréal



Le lundi 18 juillet 2016 à 19:33 -0400, LIBLICENSE a écrit :

From: Rick Anderson <[log in to unmask]>
Date: Mon, 18 Jul 2016 01:31:57 +0000

>SSRN has a huge advantage of an early starter. Most of us thought it
>would be a non-profit helping researchers around the world gain free
>access to the social science literature until one day we woke up to
>the news a commercial firm had acquired it.

My understanding is that SSRN has been a privately-owned, for-profit
operation from the beginning. Am I mistaken about that?

---
Rick Anderson
Assoc. Dean for Collections & Scholarly Communication
Marriott Library, University of Utah
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