The Radical Open Access Collective is always looking for collaborative ways to promote and support our publishing projects. Our members are mostly working academics without the resources of commercial publishers, and so mutual reliance between member presses can be really beneficial. We have always envisaged the ROAC as being a space where we can share resources and cross-promote one another’s work – and conference attendance is the perfect place to try this out.
Our friends at the ScholarLed consortium have been developing resources to further support this. Recently Julien McHardy (Mattering Press) together with Cristina Garriga (My Bookcase), have ‘open-sourced’ the design templates and files they previously created to develop the ScholarLed bookstand. The ROAC have adapted this bookstand to promote both ScholarLed and ROAC member publications. Now that the design of the bookstand is openly available here, other members might be interested in duplicating (elements of) this design to promote their and other presses publications.
This is how the bookstand looks in the wild:
The downloadable zip file on Github contains InDesign templates for all the elements that make up the bookstand, including a template to promote individual books, event lists, info sheets and a template for a bookmark. These items are currently tailored for ScholarLed members but can be easily adapted to suit your own press or project. ScholarLed uses coloured paper maps to present their books on, along with plastic stands to display them.
Flash drives and postcards
To further promote ROAC members publications we have recently ordered branded Radical Open Access Collective flash drives and information postcards (see below). The flash drives will allow us to share member publications with attendees at various conferences. The way we envision this to work is similar to the set-up used for the ‘Book of Books’ in the ScholarLed book stand, in that Sam will send all ROAC members a Dropbox link to a folder where they can upload those of their publications they would like to make available via the flash drives. We will then copy the contents of this Dropbox folder to the flash drives, which we will share with conference attendees who visit the bookstand, allowing them to upload ROAC publications to their personal devices. You can add new publications to the Dropbox folder on a continuous basis if you like, as we will regularly update the contents of the flash drives.
Sam and Janneke will add these flashdrives to the ScholarLed bookstand version currently maintained on behalf of ScholarLed member Open Humanities Press at Coventry University.
In a similar
For those of you who lack the funds to create your own flash drives or postcards, we are happy to send some to you but note that we only have a very limited number available at the moment.
There is no obligation whatsoever for you to add your publications to the flash drives of course, but please do let Sam know if you haven’t heard from him (in the next week) and would like access to the Dropbox.
In doing this, the ROAC hopes to raise the profile of alternative forms of publication and share and cross-promote all the excellent work our members are doing. Please do get in touch if you have any other ideas on how we could explore this further!