SSRN sells out to Elsevier

I’ve been a member of SSRN for quite a while now, about a decade I think.  I remember when I first joined, the excitement of posting to an open access research site, and of being part of an application that contributed to Open Access.  Couple of days ago I woke up to the news on Twitter that Elsevier had acquired it.  After giving the matter some thought, around three seconds, I contacted SSRN to delete my account and all data, personal and uploaded work.^[1]   Here’s why.

Research should be open.  Plain and simple.  No green access, no gold access, which are all devices to maximise publisher profit while making it look like they’re granting access.  Publishers don’t contribute at all financially to the massive effort of producing research: our universities, ultimately the public in a variety of ways, pay for that.  But Elsevier and others cream off grotesque profits through their journal publications divisions from already hard-pressed libraries, profit that goes straight into shareholders’ pockets.  They close down research from the general public who have paid for that research, in order to maximise shareholder profit — the public pay to have research produced, then have to pay again to read it.  And pay a third time if they want to read it for free.  The Dutch government put pressure on Elsevier to open access, but in the end settled for what’s really a highly compromised deal.  Back in 2013 the New Yorker summed up Elsevier’s general approach, and it’s only got worse since then:

Elsevier […] is infamous for restricting the flow of scientific information so it can sell research papers for as much as fifty dollars a piece, generating profit margins of thirty-six per cent and netting the company billions of dollars in revenue annually. The company has fought legislation designed to open up academic research, offered scholars money to file positive reviews, sued libraries for oversharing, and allegedly published fake journals on behalf of the pharmaceuticals industry.

Why does SSRN interest Elsevier?  Simple — it wants to increase its stranglehold on scholarly publishing, dominate the field, maximise profit.  It’s a predatory strategy.  There are no benign motives to what Elsevier does commercially.  And everything it does is commercial.  It wants to close down the free research resources of the web because such resources are an offence to its domination.  SSRN, for all its clunky interface and painful uploading processes, was a zone of free pre-publications and other research, an interchange of enormous potential for open access, had SSRN ever got its act together to improve the service on behalf of its community.  Elsevier similarly are trying it on with Wikipedia, in an ominous move last year, described as ‘Wikigate‘.

This is the face of the neoliberalist establishment, and to the shame of the academic community we allow it to flourish in our very midst.  Academics write on the corrosive effects of late capitalism, neoliberalism and then we give those writings over to publishing corporations who grow larger and more powerful on the back of our work.  This is beyond irony.  And while we turn away because we can’t be bothered really, the public purse is fleeced by these corporations, and our students, too, pay the price of ever-steepening costs of textbooks and other resources.  Academics pay that price also.  Have you checked out the price of storage recently on Mendeley, another Elsevier acquisition?  It’s risen substantially.  Elsevier will wring its hands — how else can we afford offices with basketball courts?  Even worse — Elsevier is using the profits from the vast datasets granted to them at huge and ongoing cost by the academic community to construct tools, aka research intelligence, that will enable research managers to monitor the output and quality of academic research.  So not content with harvesting your work in its journals, Elsevier now provides the tools to institutions, again at considerable cost to the institutions, to assess it and ensure that the metricisation of your work increases substantially, and league tables of research can be ever more narrowly calibrated. Over on the LSE Impact blog Thomas Leeper’s posting states the only conclusion we can come to:

The purchase of SSRN is also a vivid reminder that advocates of open science practices need to wrestle with whether the end goal of making science widely and freely available for the world can be achieved with the support of for-profit entities that have a substantial stake in the preservation of traditional closed access publishing.

But there’s another angle to this.  When I first read the news I felt a sense of betrayal.  SSRN states in its FAQ:

The 308,800+ authors who have contributed their research to SSRN have trusted us with their intellectual output. We are committed to fulfilling that trust. We are scholars, and we respect, above all, our authors’ rights in their material. We have never and will never behave opportunistically with our authors’ material.

‘Trust’, ‘respect’.  If that’s so, how come the first I heard of the acquisition of SSRN by Elsevier was on Twitter?  SSRN depends entirely on the many thousands of authors like me uploading stuff to its website.  I wasn’t asked what I wanted — I was told what would happen to my work, which was freely granted and posted with my own labour to SSRN, not Elsevier.  There was no respect over my right as a contributor.  Or – do I have no rights in this matter when I do something for no commercial gain, is that the metatext of the ToS?  Because it certainly feels to me like SSRN has behaved ‘opportunistically’ with my material.  And where are the details of the deal, even after it’s been done?  As always with Elsevier, no information.  How much was paid, for what purpose, what has SSRN agreed to do for it, who is getting the best out of this deal, what effect will this have on my work posted there, for the academic community at large.  Michael Jensen’s statement is full of future tenses and wishful thinking not borne out by an analysis of anything that Elsevier has done in the past.  And what is the SSRN Board of Trustees doing that it allows this to happen and gives us no information?  The situation is unacceptable, undemocratic, and we all collude in it if we continue to support SSRN.

Data is gold dust to Elsevier.  To all SSRN authors I would say: the corporation now profits from your papers on SSRN, from your search patterns, from your citations, from your very personal data.  Everything you do in and around SSRN contributes to their profits.  If you’re an SSRN contributor reading this post I urge you to delete your account and protest.

1. ^[1]Though this is still ongoing, with webmail messages to staff asking for total deletion, only to find my account is still there on the site.  It’s as difficult to extract yourself from SSRN, it seems, as to delete your Facebook account.↩