September 27th, 2018
SSRN and bepress are pleased to announce that, following the successful completion of a pilot with Columbia University Law School and the University of Georgia School of Law, they will pursue plans to explore further content integration between the two platforms in an effort to meet their customers’ requests for an integrated solution.
“We are excited about this collaboration. It allows us to help make life easier and more efficient for our mutual customers,” says Gregg Gordon, Managing Director at SSRN. “We believe by working together, we can better help institutions with their open access initiatives, by developing solutions for sharing content, reducing barriers to faculty participation, and capitalizing on the synergy the platforms have historically shared,” comments Jean-Gabriel Bankier, Managing Director at bepress.
Starting this fall, bepress and SSRN teams will begin experimenting with an automated solution to transfer full-text content from SSRN into bepress Digital Commons institutional repositories. The automated solution might include a transfer of already posted materials, as well as an ongoing feed of newly uploaded content. In the meantime, bepress will be offering a custom transfer service to institutions who both sign and launch their institutional repositories in the Fall of 2018.
Columbia Law School Digital Repository Specialist Zoe Bethune notes, “It was exciting to see how much content came in through the pilot. It is extremely beneficial for a young repository to be able to double their size in such a short time.”
During the next year, the teams will embark on a more detailed discovery process exploring other potential areas of integration, including developing a single upload experience, conducting expanded research into rankings and download integration, as well as sending content from Digital Commons to SSRN.
For more information about the initial pilot, watch the webinar, bepress & SSRN Pilot Results: Exploring synergies in open access legal scholarship. There will also be a presentation on the pilot and progress on the integration at the Charleston Library Conference this November, featuring Jean-Gabriel Bankier, Gregg Gordon, and pilot participant Carol Watson, Director of the Library at the University of Georgia School of Law.
For further information please contact Promita Chatterji at pchatterji@bepress.com.
