Justin Fox, Columnist

Academic Publishing Meets Open Access

Although bemoaned by scholars, Elsevier's takeover of a beloved rival will not be the death of free research papers.

May 17, 2016 at 1:57 PM EDT

Updated on

May 17, 2016 at 4:17 PM EDT

Justin Fox is a Bloomberg Opinion columnist covering business, economics and other topics involving charts. A former editorial director of the Harvard Business Review, he is author of “The Myth of the Rational Market.”

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This article is for subscribers only.

If you want to read an article from the Journal of Financial Economics, and you don't have a subscription1463489894057 or access to a library that does, publisher Elsevier will charge you $39.95. For one article!

Don't despair, though. You can also just go to the Social Science Research Network, where drafts -- in some cases final drafts -- of every single article in the current issue of the JFE (and probably every single article from the last 20 years of JFE, although I didn't have time to check that) are available for free download.

This situation, which has persisted for decades now, is what I would call interesting. It's about to get even more interesting, as Elsevier announced this morning that it is buying SSRN and combining it with the research-collaboration platform Mendeley, which it acquired in 2013.

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