SSRN's OBJECTIVES AND COMMITMENTS TO USERS

SSRN was incorporated almost 13 years ago in October, 1994. 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 80,000 authors have uploaded more than 158,000 papers and abstracts to SSRN's eLibrary, and our users have downloaded almost 16 million full text documents (currently running at approximately 4 million downloads per year).

We founded SSRN as a corporate entity because we believed it to be the most efficient form. SSRN is a collaborative of over 900 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 must be equal to or below the lowest price that such papers are available anywhere on the web to non-subscribers. The vast majority of downloads of papers from the SSRN eLibrary are free. In addition, SSRN provides free subscriptions to all of our abstracting journals to users in developing countries on request.

SSRN earns revenue to cover its expenses from institutions that outsource the distribution of their research papers to SSRN through SSRN's Research Paper Series, subscription fees for SSRN's subject matter abstracting journals, fees received for professional and job announcements, conference fees for SSRN's Conference Management System, and lastly from fees shared with SSRN by publishers who distribute their papers through SSRN on a pay per download basis.

SSRN reinvests all of the cash it receives after expenses and servicing debt, to enhance our services to authors and users. We currently spend in excess of $1,000,000 per year on system development and user support. SSRN has never paid dividends 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 80,000 authors who have contributed their research to SSRN have trusted us with their intellectual output. We are committed to fulfilling that trust. We are scholars, 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 in many ways. The most recent new features are announced on the SSRN home page. 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 (at considerable expense) cooperated with Google's request to allow them to index all of SSRN's content so Google now provides 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.

We are grateful for the following institutions that provide mirror servers for SSRN around the world: Chicago GSB, ECGI, Korea University, and Stanford Law School. These servers also serve as multiple backups to ensure that SSRN never loses its database.

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