Date: Tue, 25 Jul 2017 14:05:56 +0000

Great discussion.

To some extent, we rely on databases like CIAO and Policy File to bring our team and our users to these types of reports (it looks like both contain publications from Chatham House and Oxfam, though there may be a lag in CIAO for the newer works).  PAIS Index seems to be even more behind when it comes to Chatham House and Oxfam (I don't know enough about this particular product to hazard a guess as to why that is). We previously had good success linking to these reports via the MERLN website for our military and interagency users, but that effort lacked in things like metadata, tagging, and eventually staffing, so it's also experiencing a lag in updating.  This might be something to bring up to ITHAKA in the future?  Some of the Chatham House materials are already in JSTOR (mostly the journal articles it looks like), so this may be a good fit?

In either event, I'm really interested in the discussion on crowd-funding and the work being done by Ingenta.  Thanks for a stimulating conversation!

Trish
NDU Libraries


-----Original Message-----
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