Social Science Research Network (SSRN) Celebrates 10th Anniversary

SSRN was incorporated 10 years ago in October, 1994. It was 11-1/2
years ago that Wayne Marr invited me to join him in starting SSRN. We
have come a long way since then. Our vision was to create a way for
scholars to share and distribute their research worldwide long before
their papers worked their way through the journal refereeing and
publication process. We vowed to do so at the lowest cost possible
for authors and readers. Since then over 44,000 authors have uploaded
more than 82,000 papers to SSRN's six research networks (ARN, ERN,
FEN, LSN, MRN and SIRN), and our users have downloaded over 7 million
full text documents (currently running at the rate of 275,000
downloads per month).

We founded SSRN as a corporate entity because we believed it to be
the most efficient form. SSRN is a collaborative of over 800 scholars
worldwide who contribute their services as Advisory Editors, Editors
and Network Directors. We do not take government grants or other
subsidies nor do we take capital from outside investors, eliminating
a potential source of conflict with our authors and users.

SSRN's OBJECTIVE
SSRN's objective is to provide worldwide distribution of research to
authors and their readers and to facilitate communication among them
at the lowest possible cost. In pursuit of this objective, we allow
authors to upload papers without charge. And any paper an author
uploads to SSRN is downloadable for free, worldwide. We allow
publishers and other institutions to charge users for downloading
papers while encouraging them to charge fees that are as low as
possible. Our rule is that the price for such papers on SSRN cannot
exceed the lowest price at which these papers are otherwise available to non-subscribers. The vast majority of downloads of papers from the SSRN eLibrary are free.

SSRN reinvests all of the cash it receives (principally from
subscriptions to our abstracting journals and from institutions that
use SSRN to distribute their research papers), after servicing debt,
to enhance our services to authors and users. We currently spend in
excess of $800,000 per year on system development and user support.
None of SSRN's academic principals have ever been paid for the time
they contribute to SSRN, nor has SSRN ever paid a dividend to its
shareholders.

SSRN's COMMITMENTS
SSRN is committed to providing authors and readers with the highest
quality, most reliable services in the distribution of research. The
44,000 authors who have contributed their research to SSRN have
trusted us with their intellectual output. We are committed to
fulfilling that trust. We are authors, and we respect, above all, our
authors' rights in their material. We have never, and will never,
behave opportunistically with our authors' material. You can count on
this from SSRN and from each of us that help SSRN perform on its
commitments.

We are continuing to expand and improve our services. We have
recently added a mirror site hosted by Stanford Law School to ensure
faster and more reliable service. We will be adding two more mirrors
in the near future, one hosted by the European Corporate Governance
Institute in Belgium to serve Europe and another hosted by the Korea
University Business School to serve Asia. You will be receiving a
continuing series of announcements of these and other new services as
we roll them out.

We have invested substantially in providing a high powered search
engine that we are continually improving -- 98% of all searches on
SSRN are now completed in less than 2 seconds. We have cooperated
with Google's request to allow them to index all of SSRN's content so
they now provide an additional window into the SSRN eLibrary. We will
continue to work with Google and Google Scholar to provide the best
services possible for SSRN authors and readers.

I invite all users of SSRN's services to write me at any time
(michael_jensen@ssrn.com) to let me know what you like about our
services and how they can be improved. Our users are a constant
source of inspiration for our creativity and evolution. We invite you
to join us in creating a new model for distributing research, to
narrow the distance between authors and co-authors, institutional
sponsors, and users and readers throughout the world. These are
exciting times and we are committed to creating a resource with the
highest integrity, reliability, and functionality for disseminating
research in the social sciences, worldwide and to do it now.

Sincerely,
Michael C. Jensen
Chairman
Social Science Research Network
michael_jensen@ssrn.com

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