From: "Elias, Evelyn" <[log in to unmask]>
Date: Mon, 24 Jul 2017 12:22:22 +0000

Forwarding on behalf of my colleague, John Peters:

In building the Greenleaf Sustainable Organization Library, now
published by Rutledge

(http://gse.publisher.ingentaconnect.com/content/collection/gse_susorg2013)

we worked with former Oxfam UK Head of Publications, Robert Cornford,
to bring more than 150 of Oxfam’s high quality research reports into
our collection on sustainability and responsible management. They are
clustered in three areas, Agriculture, Food and Land; Climate Change
and Reliance; Private Sector research. Although the Greenleaf SOL is a
paid-for service, which many of you will be familiar with, the Oxfam
titles are all free-access.

Our logic for that was that, as per Ann Okerson’s opening proposal,
“Oxfam does good and important work”, so it was congruent with our
mission over and above commercial consideration to help disseminate
that, and make it more discoverable. From a marketing point of view,
association with the Oxfam brand was helpful while we were
establishing the Greenleaf online brand. Although there was a cost for
conversion of the Oxfam material, and a marginal cost for hosting,
this wasn’t major.

Rob Cornford and I were interested in how usage would look in our
collection. Over the past 12 months or so our Oxfam materials have
about 27,000 views; about 6% of the total SOL usage, while
constituting about 1.5% of titles loaded. That’s more than most of our
partner content, both in numbers and proportionality (though less than
our core Greenleaf content). So, again, from a publisher’s point of
view, this has delivered both usage and an assumed ‘usage by referral’
benefit.

To address the Big Question ‘what to do’ – think about doing what we
did, and agree a way to take some of the Oxfam content into a digital
collection. That could be something undertaken as a publisher, a
University Press, or a repository. You may not be able to measure all
the benefits, but measurement isn’t everything. My proposition was
that it would be good for us, and I stand by that. The benefits and
impact outweighed the (relatively minor) costs and effort. I always
encourage people to find creative ways to ‘do well, by doing good’ and
this was a good example. I’m happy to share more detail.

John Peters
Greenleaf Publishing in Taylor & Francis, and Digital Products
07990 007529   +44 7990 007529
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