From: <[log in to unmask]>
Date: Mon, 24 Jul 2017 19:54:38 +0000

Of course, this is just the tip of an iceberg.

A couple of weeks ago I was chatting to the Head of Communications at
Chatham House, another UK-based NGO. He was telling me that they
publish a fair number of reports a year, but simply post them on their
website. He was totally puzzled when I wondered how they would be
discovered in academic institutions; he had no idea that reaching
students and academics might require doing more than simply relying on
Google and posting free PDFs on their website. When I mentioned things
like persistent identifiers, long-term archiving, and citation tools,
I might as well have been speaking Martian - he had no idea what I was
going on about. So, yes, NGO publications do, I think, have limited
reach and are an under-discovered and an under-valued resource -
amazing when one considers how cheap they are!

So, what to do? It costs money to capture content and wrap it with the
metadata needed to insert it into both mainstream and specialist
discovery channels, to ensure it is available in a persistent and
reliable manner. A challenge when NGOs have little or no funds for
marketing. A challenge for any aggregator who would struggle to earn a
return on their investment since they would be competing against free
versions hosted on the parent website - assuming of course, they got
permission from the copyright owner to aggregate the content in the
first place.

But what if, like with arXiv, librarians 'crowd-funded' an effort that
would harvest this content from willing NGOs, large and small, do the
necessary to enrich it with industry-standard metadata (DOIs and the
like), and then feed the relevant discovery and delivery channels.
Larger NGOs like Oxfam can hire professionals like Emily to direct
their publishing programmes, but I bet smaller ones, like Chatham
House, lack in-house publishing expertise. Maybe the 'crowd-funded'
effort could also fund best-practice advice and training to improve
NGOs' ability to publish in a manner that is in tune with the demands
of the industry (like XML).

Would anyone be interested in exploring this idea?

Toby

(And due thanks to Ann Okerson for her advice in preparing this reply).

Toby Green
Public Affairs and Communications Directorate
OECD
Winner The Academic and Professional Publisher Award 2017