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Marketing

The main focus of your marketing should be libraries. They are in every sense your primary 'customer'; it is their financial support that you are seeking, and while one of the main virtues of open access publishing is that anyone can access the publications, it is still likely to be academic libraries that are the primary readers. 

We appreciate that marketing can be time-consuming and that as a small press, you don't have unlimited resources to dedicate to this. It is key to market efficiently, rather than to try to market to everyone all the time. 

The most effective marketing strategies present potential customers with multiple engagement opportunities. Because of the way that the timescales work in Opening the Future, there are many opportunities to bring the scheme to the attention of libraries.

These points include:

  • Launch of the scheme/model
  • Every time a library signs up (a press release with a quote from the library in question gives the library the opportunity to signal their support for open publication practices and also allows you to express gratitude in public for the signup)
  • Reaching the revenue threshold for the next book to become open access
  • Deciding which next new title will be open access (i.e. declaring the intent for a book to be published openly)
  • The publication of an open-access title

Press releases that feature books and authors should be illustrated and eye catching. When launching these announcements via a social media presence, you should ‘tag’ the associated individuals – whether that is a library or an author – to ensure the broadest spread of material.

All press releases should clearly indicate how libraries can support the model, with as few clicks as possible. 

Regular Marketing Activities

We undertake modest marketing activities about OtF on two different timescales; weekly and quarterly. We attempt to share one piece of news weekly from the category above, about new supporters, renewing supporters or new OA title decisions/publications. We tag the participating libraries and authors where possible in social media posts which boosts visibility to other libraries, OA initiatives/enthusiasts and other interested parties. 

Additionally, we created a mailing list of our supporter libraries and send a quarterly update. This can be quite brief, mostly summarising the information above. It may also be worth looking at the usage stats of the OA frontlist funded by OtF (comprehensive and privacy-respecting stats are very easily available if you use OAPEN and Thoth Hosting) to give the libraries an insight into the impact of the work they have funded. 

Conferences and Events

Examples of conferences at which it might be prudent to market the scheme if this is possible are:

  • Advancing Research Communication and Scholarship (ARCS) Conference
  • ALA Annual meeting
  • ALA Midwinter meeting
  • ALPSP conference
  • Asian Digital Library Conference (ADLC)
  • Association of College & Research Libraries (ACRL) conference(s)
  • AUPresses Annual Meeting
  • Australian Library and Information Association (ALIA) Information Online conference
  • Berlin Open Access Conference
  • Canadian Association of Research Libraries
  • Canadian Library Association (CLA) conference
  • Charleston Conference (also Preconference)
  • Chartered Institute of Library and Information Professionals (CILIP) conference
  • CNI / Jisc library leaders conference
  • Conference of Directors of National Libraries of Asia and Oceania (CDNLAO)
  • Congress of Southeast Asian Librarians (CONSAL)
  • DCDC (RLUK, National Archives & Jisc)
  • Electronic Resources and Libraries Conference (EL&R)
  • Frankfurt Book Fair
  • Geneva Workshop on Innovations in Scholarly Communication
  • IFLA / WLIC International Federation of Library Associations
  • International Coalition of Library Consortia (ICOLC)
  • International Conference on Asia-Pacific Digital Libraries (ICADL)
  • LIBER - Association of European Research Libraries
  • Library Collective aka LibCon
  • Library Publishing Forum
  • London Book Fair
  • Munin Conference
  • MUSE Meets conference
  • National Acquisitions Group (NAG)
  • NISO Plus
  • North American Serials Interest Group (NASIG)
  • North Carolina Serials Conference
  • OA Tage/Open Access Days (Germany)
  • OASPA conference
  • Researcher 2 Reader (R2R)
  • RLUK
  • SCONUL - UK Society of College, National and University Libraries conference
  • UKSG

If possible, you may also want to market at subject-focussed conferences relevant to the series or list you are applying the model to. 

If you have additional marketing resources, you may find relevant suggestions at the Jisc new university press toolkit or the Open Book Collective toolkit marketing section.

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