{"id":780,"date":"2018-10-24T09:16:16","date_gmt":"2018-10-24T08:16:16","guid":{"rendered":"https:\/\/blogs.imperial.ac.uk\/openaccess\/?p=780"},"modified":"2019-10-08T12:10:38","modified_gmt":"2019-10-08T11:10:38","slug":"to-whom-it-may-concern-how-to-email-a-publisher-and-get-a-useful-reply","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/blogs.imperial.ac.uk\/openaccess\/2018\/10\/24\/to-whom-it-may-concern-how-to-email-a-publisher-and-get-a-useful-reply\/","title":{"rendered":"To whom it may concern: How to email a publisher (and get a useful reply)"},"content":{"rendered":"
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This is the third of a series of blog posts by Imperial\u2019s Open Access Team for OA Week. You can also read our first post<\/a> on Publisher Problems, and our second post<\/a> on Accepted Manuscript definitions.<\/em><\/p>\n

This blog post is directed to our Open Access colleagues in Higher Education.<\/em><\/p>\n

Exaggeration for comic effect is used at the author\u2019s discretion.<\/em><\/p>\n

You have some papers where a fee has been paid for immediate Open Access months ago. The funders require that they be available with a CC BY license<\/a> by now. They aren\u2019t. Time to chase up the publishers. So you can just grab the email addresses from the publisher\u2019s websites, send them a quick note, and move on with your day, right?<\/p>\n

You head to the publisher\u2019s website for the first item on your list. But should you contact the OA team? Production? Author services? Customer services? Copyright team? This journal is published by a large commercial publisher on behalf of a learned society and so far you have only looked at the commercial publisher\u2019s page. On linking through to the society\u2019s page, you are confronted with yet another list of contacts, these with (even more) arcane job titles arranged in a mysterious hierarchy. You could email them all, but on receiving a query that was sent to twenty people, how many would assume that someone else would deal with it? (I probably would, to be fair).<\/p>\n

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Down the Rabbit Hole by Valerie Hinojosa, CC BY-SA 2.0, https:\/\/bit.ly\/2EefcXL<\/figcaption><\/figure>\n

You move on to the next publisher in your list (let\u2019s leave the tricky ones until last). There are about a hundred \u201ccontact us\u201d links from a variety of different pages, and they all lead back to the same generic Customer Services web-form. You know from experience that that web-form leads to a Kafka-esque dance as your query is forwarded and cc\u2019ed back and forth and up and down and always, ultimately, around and back to where it started, losing clarity and formatting at every step, but never accumulating any answers.<\/p>\n

Fortunately there is now a list of publisher contacts<\/a> available. In some cases, this should alleviate situations like those just described.<\/p>\n