I have a post out today on the LSE Impact Blog about Elsevier’s purchase of Social Science Electronic Publishing, Inc., the publisher of the social science preprint service SSRN. I have previously written with some skepticism about the involvement of for-profit organizations in the work of open science. My post on the Impact Blog takes a somewhat more ambivalent perspective but I would not currently say I am optimistic about the future of SSRN. That said, I hope this acquisition creates an opportunity for a robust social science analogue to arXiv. Fingers crossed at this point.

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