|
James Grimmelmann from the Information Society Project, at Yale Law School has a working paper posted at Bepress on the potential harms of SSRN. Yes folks, you can start shaking in your boots. SSRN is dangerous. James Grimmelmann, "SSRN Considered Harmful" (2007), available at Bepress: The Social Science Research Network (SSRN) has adopted several unfortunate policies that impair open access to scholarship. It should enable one-click download, stop requiring papers to bear SSRN watermarks, and allow authors to point readers to other download sites. If it does not reform, those who are serious about open access should not use SSRN. Speaking of Bepress and SSRN, I often find myself comparing the two.
Bepress has one of the most impressive search engines on the general Internet, far surpassing Google Scholar. It offers a lot of the search functionality found on Westlaw/ LexisNexis. You can set up email notification for new publicatons that match your search criteria. You can click a field in the search results and get all papers on Bepress from a specific publications, research institutions or research series. Most impressively, Bepress often host conference presentations and transcripts.
SSRN has its pros and cons. The new color function that highlights search terms is great, but kind of moot if you have Google toolbar. Clicking on an author's name to find links to all of his/her articles is immensely valuable if you really like to follow scholars' works. The simple search interface is good for quick research; but only being able to search title, keyword and author name can be limiting. Still, given the narrow range of functions on SSRN, I really have no complaints about it other than the lack of a sort-by-date feature and perhaps some kind of limited Boolean search capability.
Now, comparing search functionality is not sufficient to determine whether Bepress or SSRN is preferable. I often find papers on one site and not the other, and thus need to search both sites in my work. This fact alone makes Bepress and SSRN important to me. If I had to choose a tie-breaker though, hmmm, well, let me wait and see whether the gentleman from Yale follows up on his SSRN paper with one on Bepress:)
What do readers think? Bepress or SSRN?
posted by Noel Le @ 7:04 AM | Academia
Link to this Entry |
Printer-Friendly |
Email a Comment | Post a Comment(0)
|
