In response to a faculty research assistant’s request for guidance on locating non-proprietary copies of faculty articles for posting to the SSRN, I talked with Prof. Brad Joondeph (x4726) to get more details on how the SSRN posting process works:

1. Someone finds a non-proprietary copy of the article, and captures it as a Word document (preferred) or a PDF. In either format it can’t have the proprietary watermark on the pages (so no downloads from Lexis, Westlaw or HeinOnline).

- tip: some journals post their articles on their websites, you might also approach other journals to provide the document in electronic format (but often they never respond), and some faculty may still have their original files
- detail: few things on SSRN are older than 2000
- detail: ordinary scanning to create a PDF does NOT produce a file of adequate quality for posting to SSRN
- suggestion for RAs: consult with your faculty member/s to see how much time they want you to put into searching for fnon-proprietary full-text files of the articles, perhaps there are particular articles they would really like to post full-text and abstracts are sufficient for the rest

2. The faculty member writes an abstract for each article/chapter/book they want to put up on SSRN, (also as a Word file).

3. These files are then submitted to Christina Johnson, x4443, who completes the process of posting them to the SSRN.

4. If the articles aren’t available in a clean electronic file, faculty members can still write and post an abstract to the SSRN.

- fact: you will see many faculty listings have abstracts, but no full-text access on SSRN
- fact: academic law journal articles are widely and easily available to members of the academic community once they have the citation found in the SSRN database
- detail: most academic law journals and many law schools are already Partners in Publication with the SSRN, so the process of posting materials should go very smoothly