The publishing giant Elsevier announced this week that it had bought the Social Science Research Network, an online community where scholars in the humanities and social sciences freely share preprints of their academic work. You may have heard about this on social media, where much of the reaction was fierce and frustrated.
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The publishing giant Elsevier announced this week that it had bought the Social Science Research Network, an online community where scholars in the humanities and social sciences freely share preprints of their academic work. You may have heard about this on social media, where much of the reaction was fierce and frustrated.
The website Boing Boing offered a similarly charged metaphor: “It’s like if Monsanto bought out your favorite organic farm co-op.”
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Here’s another comparison. It might be like if Facebook bought Craigslist. Both Facebook and Craigslist are companies, but ones with very different reputations, very different business practices, and very different levels of technology. The purchase price was not disclosed.
The move is a reminder that even though Elsevier is one of the largest publishers of academic journals, it has shifted its strategy in recent years to play a more prominent role in the larger ecosystem of academic communication. A major move in that direction came in 2013, when Elsevier bought Mendeley, a service to help scholars manage their references and online documents. As Paul Foeckler, a co-founder of Mendeley, said in an interview this week, “Elsevier is becoming more of a tools-and-services company rather than a publisher.”
Many scholars have long seen Elsevier as an enemy to the scholarly enterprise because it makes hefty profits from library subscriptions to journals, even though it doesn’t have to pay the authors of the research papers. And that explains the concern as Elsevier has broadened its reach.
Leaders of SSRN, as the network is known, and Elsevier insist that all the things scholars like about the online community will stay the same but that the hub will be able to update its features and better serve researchers.
“People have joked about the antiquity of our site and user experience,” said Gregg Gordon, president of SSRN. “We were created without any external capital. We have no bank debt, we had no investment-banking money. We’ve bootstrapped it over the last 20-plus years. We were never built to sell, we were always thinking that we would just continue to grow and build it on our own. The reality is that the world has changed. As we looked at what it would take to fulfill our mission, we felt we needed a partner.”
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Mr. Gordon concedes that when Elsevier bought Mendeley, he had concerns similar to ones people were voicing on social media this week. But he is convinced that Elsevier followed through on its promise to keep the Mendeley service open and devote resources to improving it. “They’re actually better and stronger,” he said.
Thomas Reller, Elsevier’s vice president for global corporate relations, called the complaints on social media exaggerated and noted that many active users of SSRN have applauded the purchase. “Everybody should think about this logically,” he said. “It would be counterintuitive to acquire a site and then make it less attractive for scholars to do their work on it.”
Heather Joseph, executive director of the Scholarly Publishing and Academic Resources Coalition, an advocacy group promoting open access to scholarly work, said the move was a “wake-up call” that library and college leaders should pay more attention to the “infrastructure” of scholarly communication. “We need financial-sustainability plans for a research infrastructure that’s supportive of open access,” she said, arguing that large for-profit interests should not control the platforms where scholars share their work.
Some observers have pointed out that Elsevier may have good reason to shift away from just selling journals, since piracy is on the rise through sites like Sci-Hub. “The positioning is well thought out: lock up revenues to the legacy publishing business, move into areas where piracy is not much of an issue, create deeper relationships with researchers, and become more and more essential to researchers even as librarians become less so,” Joe Esposito, a publishing consultant in New York, told the journal Nature this week.
When asked about that, however, Mr. Reller, of Elsevier, said the piracy issue was “totally unrelated,” adding that “what’s happening with Sci-Hub is not influencing our strategy with developing research tools.”
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It’s true that the old scholarly model is far from obsolete. Perhaps Elsevier is simply following a path of many media companies, including textbook publishers, who would rather be a platform than a content provider.
Jeffrey R. Young writes about technology in education and leads the Re:Learning project. Follow him on Twitter @jryoung; check out his home page, jeffyoung.net; or try him by email at jeff.young@chronicle.com.
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Jeffrey R. Young was a senior editor and writer focused on the impact of technology on society, the future of education, and journalism innovation. He led a team at The Chronicle of Higher Education that explored new story formats. He is currently managing editor of EdSurge.