SSRN Responds to My Complaints With Changes and/or Clarifications

Looks like the sky will not fall, after all

My post yesterday about forthcoming changes to SSRN.com elicited a considerable amount of hubbub on social media, many emails sharing my concerns,a nd, gratifyingly, a bunch of new subscribers to my Substack.

Memo to new subscribers: In case you missed it, this Substack is billed as an “eclectic journal of Catholicism, politics, culture, food and wine, and miscellany.” The subject matter content tends to run ruminations about my faith > ruminations about legal education > recipes and wine tasting notes > miscellany > politics > culture. I hope you decide to stick around.

You may also (or alternatively) be interested in my other Substack, BainbridgeOnCorporations.com, which is 100% corporate governance and law.

The Original Post

SSRN Responds

Earlier today I received an email from SSRN management:

We at SSRN are aware of your recent Substack post and I just wanted the opportunity to share some additional context and clarity with you; please see SSRN’s Ongoing Commitment to Legal Scholarship – SSRN Blog.

Their blog post states, in part, with interspersed commentary:

We are aware that Professor Bainbridge raises understandable concerns about changes at SSRN, particularly given how central the platform is to legal scholarship. …

We would like to clarify a few specific points raised by Professor Bainbridge ….

I appreciate the recognition and the use of the word “understandable.”

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.

I take this statement mean that institutionally-focused email lists like the UCLA Law and Economics ejournal will be cancelled, but that the subject matter email ejournals will continue. If so, that is very, very good news.

For one thing, as noted in the earlier post, I rely on the subject matter ejournals to keep up to date with developments in my field (corporate law) and other areas of interest (such as law and religion). I am glad that I will be able to continue doing so.

As I noted in the earlier post, UCLAW plans to shift to the UC’s open access repository, eScholarship, as the law school’s default repository. But apparently we will be given the option of also having our work posted to SSRN.

I plan to select the option to have my work posted to SSRN, in large part because I believe the ejournals are a great way of having my new scholarship brought to the attention of others in the field. I suspect a lot of people are like me in using them as a way of monitoring our professional reading options.

Published work in legal scholarship will continue to be posted in most cases, except where prohibited by copyright, as we have done in the past.

Good.

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.

This is very good news. As I noted in the earlier post, the CC-BY copyright license, it is the most open and permissive Creative Commons license.

This change is another reason 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.

Final Thoughts

I’ve just hit the highlights of SSRN’s response. I urge interested readers to go check out the whole post.

I note that SSRN concludes:

Please continue to share your thoughts and concerns with us and thank you for your patience as we grow into the future.

I encourage you to do so.

In sum, 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 accomodate them.

As noted, given these developments, I plan to continue using SSRN.

1. I am reliably informed it was the latter, but SSRN has not publicly said so.