SSRN has reached several milestones this year and it's only June. First, the SSRN eLibrary (http://ssrn.com/search) grew to 190,000 documents (and is growing at the rate of 40,000 documents per year), the number of SSRN authors now exceeds 95,000, and we are close to 22 million downloads to date. In December, I predicted we would reach 20 million downloads by this fall and I am delighted to be proven wrong. Downloads of full text documents have been averaging over 600,000 per month this year and we expect 25 million total downloads by the end of the year.

For many years, SSRN has reported only a fraction of the total downloads that our servers deliver. In April, we reported roughly 650,000 downloads of the actual total 1.4 million downloads that delivered. The 750,000 downloads we didn't report were from activities such as search engine bots (e.g., Google, Yahoo and MSN), anonymous users, and multiple downloads from the same user or the same IP address.

Our technical team has provided incredible support during this period of significant growth. They recently completed a substantial upgrade to the SSRN servers and systems so that we can handle three times the current load.

Today we will release our new Simple Submission process. The feedback on the beta version has been highly favorable ("This is the best online submission I have seen.") and occasionally critical ("Why did it take so long to develop it."), but everyone likes it. Please let me know what you think of it.

SSRN's newly designed abstract and author pages will be released after the mid-year break and will include easier access to the beta version of the CiteReader citation technology that we announced late last year (http://ssrn.com/update/CiteReader.html).

Our mid-year break is scheduled for Monday, 23 June through Sunday, 6 July 2008. During the break, SSRN's abstracting eJournals will not be distributed so that we can perform maintenance on our database and add new networks and abstracting journals to our offerings. During this break period we will continue to provide support for downloads, submissions, and subscriptions. For any requests during the break, please contact UserSupport@SSRN.com or call toll free 877-SSRNHelp (877.777.6435). Outside of the United States, call 00+1+585+442-8170.

To borrow a phrase, we have two more things:

As SSRN's use has increased so has its reputation as a source of scholarship. I was pleasantly surprised to see that the U.S. Supreme Court cited a SSRN working paper in its recent Boumediene v. Bush opinion (actually the second time a SSRN working paper was cited this year by the Court) and several law blogs report these to be the first ever citations to working papers in Supreme Court opinions. We are pleased to see that the Court values SSRN's "Tomorrow's Research Today." Thanks to the law bloggers for keeping me informed and to all of you for contributing to SSRN's scholarship.

Noam Cohen, from The New York Times, wrote an article (http://tinyurl.com/5qacbk) last week about SSRN, discussing the effect of SSRN's rankings on scholarship that you may find interesting. I have received complimentary emails and a few good ideas about improving SSRN as a result of the article. Tim Kane posted his interview of SSRN Chairman Michael Jensen regarding SSRN's history on the Growthology Blog (http://www.growthology.org/growthology/2008/06/interview-with.html).

As always, if I can be of assistance or if you have suggestions on how to improve SSRN, please contact me at Gregg_Gordon@SSRN.com or use our new "Feedback to SSRN" link on most SSRN web pages.

Thank you again for being part of the SSRN Community.

Gregg Gordon
President
Social Science Research Network

Search the SSRN eLibrary | Browse SSRN | Top Ten Downloads