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[1233312]

Has anyone besides an economist had any experience with putting work onto SSRN?
I'm trying to decide if I should post a working paper or two to see if I get comments or potential collaborators. I hear that you don't necessarily get feedback, but it can help with citations and visibility. (I do see the whole WOS citation problem with working papers, although on the other hand, having something on SSRN does give you claim to 'being there first' in a case of plagiarism...)

So, ideas, experiences, advice? I've so far only been able to google up reviews and advice from econ and law, which aren't as helpful for me...

Thank you!

[octoprof]

I do. Some folks in my field, or rather the largest subfield of my field, use SSRN like mad. It's very popular. Folks make claims about the usefulness of their research because of citations there and so forth.

[new_bus_prof]

Many people who receive public funding require a research report be made freely available/accessible to the public. SSRN accomplishes this.

[untenured]

Absolutely.  SSRN has been helpful in distributing my work to the widest possible audience.  Invitations to speak, colleagial correspondence, queries from colleagues from allied fields, a productive co-author relationship, and even a paid trip to Europe have all come from SSRN publications.

Unless my co-author objects (one has so far), I place my working drafts on SSRN.  My download or view rank (I can't remember which) is in the top 5% of all authors on SSRN.  You bet that 'lil bit of knowledge is going to the Dean come tenure time.

So little to lose.  So much to gain.

SSRN rules.

Untenured 

[donstefano]

I'm using it in a non-economic discipline: practical, because it gives you good statistics on what topics are popular; I link my own website to it for paper downloads (makes maintenance of my website easier); and because there are as yet few contributors in my discipline (but growing fast) often end up in the top 10 downloaded papers list for my field!

[1233312]

(OP here) Thanks for the helpful comments.

A few more questions:
1. Has anyone ever had a complaint from a journal editor about you having the working paper up on SSRN? If so, did you have to take it down or did they reject your article submission or  what? (I have heard vague complaints in this direction from humanities people, but I'm not sure if this is a worry for social science...)

2. Once you get an article published, do you take down the working paper from SSRN and link to the published article or what?

(Given the good feedback here, I think I'll go ahead and post something to SSRN and see how it goes.)

Also, has anyone noticed that SSRN has gotten quite slow lately?

[obprof]

OP, what field are you in?

In OB/HR/IO Psychology, decent journals (e.g., JAP) will NOT allow you submit work that has been previously published... and by previously published they actually mean posted on the web (as well as in another article or a book chapter).

[collegekidsmom]

Rules here would be similar to those used for versions posted in your institutional repository if you have one. If you are posting something that is not peer-reviewed yet(I am not sure what your field is), then it would be considered a preprint.. Different journals and publishers have a whole variety of rules about what can and cannot be posted on the open web. You might want to take a look at the copyright transfer arrangements or other wording(try to keep your author rights) from a few journals in your field that you might be interested in. If you are looking for web visibility, subject and institutional repositories can't be beat, and editors are trolling them as well. Usually the preprint would differ from the "accepted version" which would differ from the final published version. Many journals(in social sciences) would be OK with earlier versions of articles in repositories. You would not normally remove (or might not be able to remove) earlier versions that turn into published articles. The versions show up in say, Google Scholar all together, and readers who can't access subscribed journals due to lack of subscription will be happy to use another version. The most popular version would be the accepted final postprint(after peer review) but before final copyedited publisher branded version. Sharing data is another issue for the social sciences.

SSRN is one of the big subject repositories; very well known with lots of visibility. You really should discuss this with people in your subfield. The whole behavior of self-archiving is so discipline-specific.

[untenured]

I agree you should check with colleagues and editors in your discipline.  In mine, SSRN has never been a problem.  No editor has ever balked at the posting of a draft on SSRN.  Once the articles are accepted, they stay there.  The published copy is usually at least slightly different than the SSRN version anyway.

Untenured