Breaking academic news:

Elsevier, a world-leading provider of scientific, technical and medical information products and services, announced today the acquisition of the Social Science Research Network (SSRN)….SSRN will be further developed alongside Mendeley, a London-based free reference manager and scholarly collaboration network owned by Elsevier….

Elsevier provides web-based, digital solutions – among themScienceDirect, Scopus, Elsevier Research Intelligence and ClinicalKey – and publishes over 2,500 journals, including The Lancet and Cell, and more than 33,000 book titles, including a number of iconic reference works. Elsevier is part of RELX Group, a world-leading provider of information and analytics for professional and business customers across industries. http://www.elsevier.com

What does this change mean for publishing authors and researchers?  Content will remain free to post and download. Elsevier acquired Mendeley in 2013 creating controversy over Mendeley's continued "trustworthiness" as a part of a for-profit enterprise. Since the acquisition, Mendeley doubled its subscribers from 2.5 to 5 million.  Elsevier's interest in SSRN, a profitable site for over 13 years, is primarily in its potential for generating user data and analytics.  Integrating SSRN and Mendeley services is predicted to strengthen

"connections between SSRN author pages and Mendeley professional profiles, and workflow connections that allow Mendeley collaborative groups to submit papers for distribution and perhaps eventually review and publication.  There will also be other opportunities to strengthen SSRN for its authors, with plans to link preprints on SSRN with Scopus, bringing analytics about article “performance” to SSRN authors, and to bring improved links between working papers and preprints with their eventual published versions."

Would it be too much to hope for a cosmetic overhaul of the website too?

The acquisition raises some interesting questions for those in academics whose scholarly productivity, national reputation and other outputs are increasingly measured with data points provided from sites like SSRN.  Changes to the substance of the website may change how those metrics are generated and what they mean.  The creation of new metrics available to authors (and schools) may provide for more reportable data points for our annual faculty reports with the questions remaining how useful are those metrics and what do they tell us about the value of ideas?

-Anne Tucker