SSRN and preliminary works

Dan Markel complains that because SSRN is now being used as a way to evaluate scholars, it is now less useful for getting feedback on preliminary drafts, given the risk of being evaluated on a half-baked product.

Let me see if I follow this: I’ll take the risk of publishing a lower-quality finished product, on which I’ll be evaluated for the rest of my career, because I don’t want to be evaluated on preliminary drafts.

Huh?

As SSRN Michael Jensen points out in commenting on Markel's post, there are ways of dealing with this by notations on papers. He also notes that SSRN can be used as a private distribution network.

Private distribution is a good way to get comments, but imperfect because there’s information from strangers you miss. One reason why I have my blog is to encourage feedback on my papers by noting various ways the papers relate to the issues discussed on the blog.

Many of the papers I see in final form could have gained a lot from exposure at a preliminary stage.  Particularly in law and economics, there is stuff appearing that makes some really basic mistakes or doesn't tie into major threads of the literature.  Maybe some of that would be avoided by preliminary exposure.

Apart from this problem, I confess to being irritated by papers that are put on SSRN shortly before, or after, appearing in print. This signals to me an author who may not be interested in getting useful feedback before going into final form, or is more interested in rushing ideas into print -- making that next law review distribution -- than getting it right.  I may be wrong in my judgment -- Dan's post indicates there are other factors at play. My point is, you don't necessary avoid critical judgments by not exposing preliminary drafts.

Of course I’m not suggesting using SSRN as a repository for rough drafts, though I confess to doing this at least once myself – for my blogging paper – which I represented explicitly as a rough work in progress, like blogging itself. I also understand that symposium deadlines may not always permit preliminary circulation of reasonably polished drafts. What I object to is the failure to use SSRN for products that ready for meaningful feedback just because the feedback may be negative. I hope that doesn't become a norm.

Comments

[Dan Markel]

Larry, I might just be overly-cautious, but I want to stress that I'm not endorsing the norm change I identify in my post. I'm not in favor of it, and I'm glad Michael Jensen sees the same concern I do. It is worth noting, again based on simple anecdotal experience, that few people I know actually receive comments from strangers on their drafts, which raises questions about whether the vision of SSRN is being realized; I know I haven't. To the extent the vision's not being realized, I'm sad about that.
(And, perhaps I'm being defensive here, but to address any implicit critique in Larry's post, I'll note that, in my own case, I have in the past posted drafts substantially prior to publication; it just so happens that now I only have final drafts posted on SSRN. The works I have in progress are really far too preliminary to post...and I should have made that more clear in my original post; but I hope to rectify that by late spring or summer. In other words, I'd actually like to have a complete draft before posting. I don't think people who wait until that stage are shrinking from criticism. In any event, I'm not sure Larry's post was aimed at me, but I thought I'd clarify/supplement with this.)