The Clinical Research Institute, sponsored by New
York Law School and edited by Rick Marsico and Stephen Ellmann, is a part
of the Legal Scholarship Network, which in turn is part of SSRN, the
Social Science Research Network. SSRN is a website on which scholars from
around the world post their work, including works-in-progress and also
published pieces, so that their scholarship is readily available to other
scholars. In other words, it is a way of bringing scholarship to others'
attention, not only because we all want our work noticed, but also so that
readers can learn from the pieces they download and authors can learn from
the feedback they receive.
We will be happy to post any work of
clinical scholarship, from clinicians in the United States and
elsewhere. There is no fee to either the authors of posted works or to
those who download them. Anyone who is presenting a paper at a clinical
conference, such as an AALS workshop or a regional clinical meeting, or at
one of the clinical scholarship workshop series now meeting in various
parts of the country, would be welcome to post his or her work; so would
authors who simply have drafts which they would like others to be able to
read.
If you are new to SSRN, you may be interested in a
PowerPoint presentation created byAssociate Professor of Law Susan Duncan
at the University of Louisville. The presentation, "Demystifying the
SSRN Process," is available on Professor Duncan's blog by clicking here.
There is more to say about how the Institute, and SSRN, work. Continue
reading below for frequently asked questions. Simply click on any question
to see its explanation:
Who can post articles through the
Clinical Research Institute?
Anyone. We expect most people posting with
the Institute, or downloading from it, will be clinical faculty in the
United States and other countries, but other faculty, and practicing
lawyers, are very welcome to post their clinical scholarship
too.
What is clinical
scholarship?
Whatever the abstract debates about the meaning of this term,
we understand it broadly, to include articles about clinical pedagogy;
clinical models for the practice of law; and clinically-based appraisals
of legal institutions and rules. Perhaps the most ambiguous category is
the last of these. An article on the nature of practice in family court,
growing out of a clinician's experience in a domestic violence clinic,
would be a clinically-based appraisal of a legal institution; on the other
hand, an article on a particular point of substantive family law doctrine,
even if its roots lay in a clinician's experience working with that legal
issue, most likely would not. While it is our responsibility to decide
whether a piece is or is not clinical scholarship, we will be inclusive
rather than exclusive in making these decisions, so if you feel your piece
is clinical even though it does not seem to fit these definitions, please
get in touch with Rick and we can think this through together.
How
do I post?
Please contact Claire Voulgarelis at New York Law School
(212-431-2845, cvoulgarelis@nyls.edu). Ms.
Voulgarelis will ask you for contact information; an article abstract
(this is necessary whether or not you post the text of your article); and
a modest amount of additional information. Although the SSRN website
offers a button for "Abstract & Paper Submission," every
piece submitted to SSRN for inclusion in the Clinical Research Institute
will be forwarded to us for substantive review and technical processing,
so it will save time if you start right away with Ms.
Voulgarelis!
Must
an article be finished to be posted?
No. In fact, the ideal time to post an
article is probably before it is finished, when interested readers can
make comments to you before you publish it. Unpublished manuscripts do
have copyright protection, and we think that in general we can rely on
each other not to make any improper use of the ideas in posted, but
not-yet-published, articles.
Can
published articles, as well as not-yet-published ones, be posted?
Yes. Please keep in mind, however, that a
published article can only be posted with the explicit permission of the
copyright-holder, typically the journal that published the piece. We
expect that this permission will usually be forthcoming, but you will need
to make sure that that is the case for your paper.
If
I post a work-in-progress and then make revisions, can the revisions be
posted?
Definitely. We will be happy to replace your initial version
with a later one if you want.
Can I
post just an abstract of my work, rather than the full text?
Yes. If you do this,
then people who want a copy of your manuscript or published article will
be able to contact you, using the contact information that will be
included in the posting. But we encourage you to post the full text, since
that is the quickest way to bring your manuscript to readers.
Are
posted articles still publishable in hard copy?
Yes. SSRN and the Clinical Research Institute do not
claim any copyright in your articles.
Even if posted articles are still
theoretically publishable in hard copy, does posting a work-in-progress
make it less attractive to publishers?
It should not, and we do not think it
normally will either. SSRN publication is not hard-copy publication. The
fact that a draft article excites interest via SSRN should, if anything,
suggest that the final version will excite interest too—and,
realistically, it seems unlikely that law journals' hard copy sales are
going to be directly increased or decreased much by the availability of
essays on SSRN. We think SSRN's Legal Scholarship Network complements
hard-copy publication. In addition, we are glad to be able to
say that the editors-in-chief of the Clinical Law Review, in
particular, support the establishment of the Clinical Research
Institute.
One other step that SSRN is able to take would further
reduce whatever anxiety journal editors might have: SSRN can block
access to the text of articles being published in a particular journal
around the time of the hard-copy publication. That way, whatever special
interest there might be in hard copy can be tapped by the journal (aided
by your abstract, which will still be available on SSRN), and after this
interest has waned, the full text of the article can be made available
again on SSRN. Finally, though we think very few journals will ask you to
do this, if necessary you can even have a paper that you’ve already
posted be completely removed from the SSRN site, if you ultimately publish
with a journal that wants you to do that.
Why
post?
Posting your articles makes them readily available to a wide
audience of people interested in clinical scholarship. As of August 2006,
the Clinical Research Institute has nearly 800 subscribers, a number we
hope to increase. In addition, authors who post their articles can
use the Clinical Research Institute site as a link through which to make
their work accessible to nonsubscribers B for example, by
including the link on their faculty webpage.
What does subscribing to the
Clinical Research Institute mean?
As articles are submitted for posting
through New York Law School, SSRN compiles them into the electronic
equivalent of issues—typically, sets of about five pieces. The
abstracts of these five pieces are then sent in an email message to all
Institute subscribers. If the posting includes not only the abstract but
the text of the piece, the email message will include the URL (the website
address) for downloading, and subscribers can click directly to
it.
Does a piece posted with the
Clinical Research Institute get announced only to Institute
subscribers?
No. Each author posting a piece can designate up to four other
journals within the Legal Scholarship Network in which the author would
like his or her article to also be distributed, and the issues of these
journals in turn are sent by email to those subscribing to them. (Each
journal, however, makes its own decisions about including articles, as the
Clinical Research Institute does.) Again, subscribers will be able to click
directly from the article abstracts to the SSRN site for downloading any
articles that have been posted in full text.
Who can subscribe?
Anyone. We hope that
every clinician will be interested in subscribing; the more subscribers
there are, the more widely the posted articles will be
distributed.
How
can people interested in the Institute's papers
subscribe?
Because New York Law School sponsors the Clinical Research
Institute, there is no fee at all for subscriptions. This is true, by the
way, even if your school doesn’t have a site license with SSRN
(though a great many law schools do have these licenses, which enable
individual faculty to subscribe without charge not only to free SSRN
sites, such as the Clinical Research Institute, but also to others that do
have a subscription fee). The SSRN website, from which to start the
subscription process (which is not elaborate), is at http://www.ssrn.com; there you will
find a “subscribe” icon at the top of the page.
Can non-subscribers also access
and download Clinical Research Institute papers?
Yes. At the SSRN
website, http://www.ssrn.com,
you will also find a button for "Search & Download
Papers." Free registration with SSRN, which provides a number of
benefits including free downloading, is available through http://umgt.ssrn.com.
How can I locate an article in
the Clinical Research Institute collection?
First, the Clinical Research
Institute already has its own URL, http://www.ssrn.com/link/Clinical-Research-Institute.html.
Clicking on this link will take you to a page listing all Clinical Research
Institute postings to date (46 as of February 2, 2007, downloaded a total
of 2,953 times (including downloads from the Institute site and from other
SSRN postings of these papers)) . You can also reach the
Institute's page by clicking through several steps from the
SSRN homepage.
Second, SSRN's full library can be
readily searched by author name, and by keywords in the article title or
abstract. Again, the starting point is the SSRN home page, http://www.ssrn.com.
How can authors use their SSRN
postings in connection with their own webpages?
If you have a
webpage, for example through your school, at which you describe your work
and/or list your publications, you can include on that page a link to your
author page at SSRN. Every person who posts with the Clinical Research
Institute will have his or her own URL (website address) for such an
author page. That URL will bring people to a list of all papers the author
has posted with SSRN, and in turn to the abstracts and downloadable texts
of all articles which the author has posted. Clicking to the abstract will
also bring up information on how many times the abstract has been viewed,
and on how many times the full text has been downloaded. The
author's contact information is also included.
Can other organizations link to
the Clinical Research Institute's site?
Yes. We hope, for example, that clinical
conference organizers will encourage participants to post their papers on
the site, and that the conference organizers will include a link to the
Institute's site in their own websites or other publicity.
Anyone interested in setting up such a link should get in touch with Rick
Marsico to make arrangements.
