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Outreach to Open Access or scholarly communications librarians

In our experience, direct outreach to libraries has seen the most impact. Open access librarians are often extremely savvy and well versed in new models for open access. Given the affordability of Opening the Future and the fact that scholarly communications budgets are being cut back, this initiative offers a powerful and affordable way for institutions to signal their support for open -access books, even when they do not have a great deal of available funding.

One potential point of confusion for this group is that they may misconstrue Opening the Future as a read-and-publish or transformative agreement. That is, they may erroneously believe that they are paying for their authors to publish openly with the press. Communication with librarians in this group must stress the novelty of the approach and that the aim is to reach the entire frontlist becoming OA, thereby avoiding the need for hybrid interim measures. We also made this clear in our website’s FAQ section (reproduced on this Infohub in section _________). 

Key elements of this outreach include:

  • Stressing the affordability of the initiative, with particular reference comparison to BPCs.
  • Emphasising the need to avoid Book Processing Charges.
  • Where accurate and where you have the data to support this, tying the request to authors from the institution without implying that this is a transformative agreement (i.e. showing that authors from the institution are publishing with the press).
  • Tying the request to subject-specific readership/usages (e.g. are there books set on courses at the university that are published by the press?).
  • Stress the relevance of the backlist being offered to their research and/or teaching collections.
  • Personalisation so as not to come across as marketing spam.
  • Complying with all General Data Protection Regulation (GDPR) provisions for opt-out if a librarian does not wish to hear any more.

Here is a generic template based on our own outreach to open access / scholarly communications librarians: 

Dear_____,

If I may introduce myself, I work at [publisher name]. The Press publication focus is on ______. The Press is particularly recognised for its books about______.

We feel that it is particularly important for the Press frontlist titles to be open access where possible. [If there is a particular reason, such as the frontlist you are deciding to open being of particular political or cultural relevance, list it here]. 

I am writing to ask if your institution would consider joining Opening the Future/[whatever name you may give your own implementation of it], our collective membership scheme, which gives your library perpetual access to gated packages of high-quality ebooks on these subjects - using the membership fees to then publish forthcoming frontlist titles open access without charging the author or their institution.

Rather than waiting for a specific threshold, each library subscription contributes to incrementally flipping the Press’ frontlist to OA. 

WHAT DOES IT COST:

Membership is extremely cost-effective, with pricing tiered according to size of institution. Access to the packages of books starts at just £_____ per package p.a. for the smallest libraries, up to £_____ p.a. for the largest. Signing up is simple through Jisc’s standard Licence Subscription Manager and all membership fees are used only to produce new OA frontlist monographs. 

WHAT’S INCLUDED: ______ Press is offering ____ titles across ____ packages on _______.

For a full list of the packages, please see here [insert link to your relevant site].

HOW TO JOIN: Jisc/Lyrasis members can subscribe through their normal acquisition process at:

  • [Insert relevant catalogue link here]

The backlist titles in the packages are DRM-free with unlimited concurrent access via [your backlist content host], are accessible on persistent DOIs, and have easily ingestible metadata in the form of KBART or MARC files. COUNTER-compliant usage data is also available. Our backlist books have simple, non-restrictive licensing through SERU allowing flexibility to reuse them in institutional educational resources, and with concurrent multi-user access.

This subscription model also represents an important shift in how OA books are funded, moving away from the dominant, and often unaffordable, BPC model, spreading costs more equitably, and helping to create a global OA collection. It is compliant with OA monograph mandates such as UKRI’s. 

I would be happy to answer any questions - with many thanks for your consideration of this proposal. If you have a colleague who might be better placed to consider this, may I please ask you to send this email on to them.

Best wishes,

[insert name]

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