Self-Archiving Guide: Unpublished Papers

Following on from my earlier post: My next experiment with self-archiving was with the Social Science Research Network (SSRN). This service was established to promote the rapid dissemination of research findings via abstracts and full-text papers. It was recently ranked number one by the "Ranking Web of World Repositories." I post a number of links to SSRN papers on this blog, particularly those with a legal focus.

I have an unpublished paper that I eventually may submit to a journal. However, in the interim, I thought I would submit it to SSRN to experience yet another repository's submission process. Once again, the time it took to actually upload the document was minimal: 15 minutes. As I did before, I spent a little time prior to the submission process reading through guidelines and converting my document to PDF. The fact that my paper is unpublished certainly simplified matters, since I did not have to investigate copyright policies or article archiving permissions. SSRN's form was very user-friendly, and included sufficient instruction to help me along the way. Upon uploading the document, I once again was notified that the paper would not become available until after review by an SSRN editor.

All in all, very straightforward. You can submit abstracts, pre- and post-prints to SSRN as well as unpublished papers, and while there is no embargo option, you can designate papers that you've uploaded as private, and then change their status once a certain period of time has passed.

Tagged Publications and Web Sites/Tools.