Publisher-Library Partnership for Accessibility: A Case Study of Scholarly Publishing for Public Audiences

This is the authors' peer-reviewed final manuscript.Public outreach and access are becoming more and more important across institutions of higher education. Sustainable information technology approaches are necessary to communicate and preserve public education materials generated as part of this new era of “outreach and engagement.” This paper describes the partnership between Oregon State University’s Extension Service publishing arm and the Oregon State University Libraries to make Oregon State University the first land-grant institution to systematically publish outreach materials using the university’s institutional repository. This partnership models how institutional repositories can be used to publish outreach products developed through faculty scholarship; the university’s outreach materials are thus simultaneously digitally preserved and made discoverable and accessible to a wide public audience. Intra-institutional partnerships, such as the one described in the case study, can be mutually beneficial in the current environment of limited resources and desire for cross-disciplinary collaboration