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 [log in to unmask]