SSRN, Strategic Update: Renewed Focus on Core Research Sharing Mission (Apr. 13, 2026)
At SSRN, our mission is to rapidly share preprints and other early-stage research, empowering global scholars to help shape a better future. Today we are announcing an important change that reflects where we believe we can make the greatest contribution to that mission.
We have decided to focus entirely on SSRN’s core function as a free, world-class preprint platform. As a result, we will be closing our commercial products (Research Paper Series, Sponsored Networks and Site Subscriptions, paid Conference Proceedings, Data Analytics Dashboards, Partners in Publishing, Jobs and Announcements, and Data Feeds) by the end of December 2026.
Stephen Bainbridge (UCLA), The Social Science Research Network Has Jumped the Shark (June 3, 2026):
Significant and unwelcome changes to what had been legal academia’s major open source scholarly repository and notice system. …
The UCLA Law Library has notified our faulty that SSRN has announced “significant and unwelcome changes,” including:
- SSRN is discontinuing its Research Paper Series at the end of July.
- Already-published papers and book chapters will no longer be eligible for posting on SSRN after July.
- SSRN will require authors submitting preprints or working papers to select a CC-BY license. A CC-BY license permits others to distribute, remix, adapt, and build upon the work, including for commercial purposes, so long as appropriate attribution is given.
The research paper series has been an incredibly useful way of staying on top of recent scholarly developments. It gives you a listing of recently posted works and, crucially, each work’s abstract. As such, you know whether or not the paper looks to be of sufficient interest to justify downloading and reading the whole work. I shall miss it greatly.
Disallowing published works means that open access to my publications will become more difficult. … As for the CC-BY copyright license, it is the most open and permissive Creative Commons license. It allows anyone—including AI providers—to copy, distribute, remix, adapt, or build upon a creator’s work, even commercially, provided they give the original author credit for the creation. Once applied, a CC-BY license cannot be revoked by the creator. The license remains valid for the duration of the copyright of that work. It guts the author’s ability to impose any more significant limitations.
SSRN, Ongoing Commitment to Legal Scholarship (June 4, 2026):
We are aware that Professor Bainbridge raises understandable concerns about changes at SSRN, particularly given how central the platform is to legal scholarship. For many of us, SSRN is not just a repository; it is the backbone of early dissemination, discovery, and intellectual exchange in the legal academy.
Institutional research paper series will be closed on a rolling basis at the end of each institution’s existing term, or at the end of December 2026, whichever comes first. … With the exception of some sponsored niche areas, existing areas of legal scholarship on the site and their associated email alerts will continue unchanged. …
While SSRN will introduce the ability to select a CC-BY license at submission later this year, options will include CC-BY, CC-BY-NC and CC-BY-NC-ND, providing additional flexibility and choice for authors. Additionally, authors may opt out of applying a CC license.
Stephen Bainbridge (UCLA), SSRN Responds to My Complaints With Changes and/or Clarifications (June 4, 2026):
Looks like the sky will not fall, after all. …
[S]ubject matter email ejournals will continue. … [T]hat is very, very good news. …
I will continue using SSRN. But I plan to opt for the CC-BY-NC-ND license. It is the most restrictive of the six main Creative Commons licenses. It allows others to download and share your work, but they cannot change it in any way or use it commercially, and they must always give you credit. I think that should help limit the use of my work my AI companies for training their models, although I recognize that they claim that fair use allows them to do so. …
I don’t know whether SSRN’s response is merely clarifications or if I managed to induce some changes in their policy.1 In either case, I appreciate SSRN management taking my concerns—which I believe were widely shared—seriously and seeking to accommodate them.
1 I am reliably informed it was the latter, but SSRN has not publicly said so.
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