OIPA Symposium Spotlight – ‘Dare to boast: In defence of book marketing and celebrating wins’

OIPA Symposium Spotlight – ‘Dare to boast: In defence of book marketing and celebrating wins’

Elinor Potts, Marketing and Communications Officer at LSE Press, builds upon their lightning talk at the 2025 OIPA Symposium.

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Celebrating success should not be perceived as radical, or boastful — and yet somehow, it can be perceived as such.

British sensibilities encourage us to downplay achievements, to stay humble, and to quietly hope that good work will speak for itself. But in today’s noisy, AI-polished, win-saturated world – online and in-person – silence doesn’t necessarily look like humility anymore. By silently guarding our achievements, we risk invisibility, and projecting an air of disengagement and a lack of conviction.

Protecting our modesty and failing to win the recognition that sustains our shared mission as open institutional publishers inhibits the potential impact of our goals at a critical moment in time.

Crisis in brewing in wider academic publishing, and as CUP’s Mandy Hill recently shared in The Bookseller, this is ‘critical juncture’ for the industry and it will ‘break without change.’ Caroline Edwards communicated a similar message in her recent piece for Research Professional News, writing: ‘what’s certain is that the Big Five will no longer reap the obscene profit margins they’ve enjoyed for decades. Their multimillion-dollar agreements with artificial intelligence companies may be the last windfall.’

There is hope in CUP’s research featured in The Bookseller – given that of the 3,000+ surveyed researchers, publishing partners, funders, librarians and publishers from 120 countries – CUP found that the majority of respondents (86%) supported articles being made freely available, with less than a third (32%) believed the current system is in a good position to meet future challenges.

As open access book marketers, there is an opportunity for us to utilise here, and coming together and aligning our actions as OIPA members can help us achieve this.

Diamond OA publishing is mentioned several times in the report, and is proposed as one way of addressing systemic inequities for authors in low-middle income countries.

As I suggested in my lightning talk presentation at OIPA’s 2025 Symposium, I want to suggest that maybe it’s time – especially in open access publishing – to dare to boast.

I’m going to start with a quote, but not from someone who you might expect, or would necessarily agree with my choice of font.

The philosopher Arthur Schopenhauer was perhaps not a natural born marketer, as someone painfully conscious of negativity and bleakness. This is something I experienced first-hand where marketing a reprint of On the Suffering of the World in a former role during the covid-19 pandemic – darkly amusing in hindsight, given there was so much suffering in the world at that time.

Schopenhauer famously distrusted optimism and perceived human striving as endless and largely futile; driven by an insatiable ‘will’ that could never be satisfied.

There is a danger with this outlook. If we internalise too much of Schopenhauer’s pessimism about expression we risk retreating into self-effacing silence, which is not something which aligns with our open access publishing values. We need to retain visibility for open access publishing.  

Schopenhauer believed the world was driven by blind will, but our work in publishing is far from this: it’s intentional, collaborative, and purposeful. When we share successes, be those new books, milestones, or partnerships, we’re not feeding vanity, we’re fuelling access, engagement, and trust.

In open access, marketing isn’t self-promotion; it’s mission promotion. Each announcement is an invitation to join a movement that wants to democratise knowledge – a goal Schopenhauer himself, who believed truth should be accessible beyond academic elites, might have quietly approved of.

To stand out, we should frame our achievements around impact; using metrics which matter to readers, librarians, and being vigilant of ‘vanity metrics’ which don’t pair our publications with real-life impacts, policy changes, and global reach.

We should also find the authentic voices of our readers, authors and partners to help bring new audiences into our OA movement. Through listening to them, surveying them, and taking their feedback into consideration, we can continue to understand what really matters to audience segments and how our publications as ‘products’ can satisfy their needs. Marketing, done well, isn’t about boasting for attention, it’s about connecting people to meaning and meaningful products.

There is so much good which comes from publishing research openly which we owe it to the movement to share – it furthers our cause and attracts new readers and writers to our collective endeavour.

When we celebrate achievements in publishing, we’re not boasting, we’re bearing witness to progress. We’re showing that collaboration, openness, and persistence still matter.

I invite you to dare to boast; not for vanity, but for visibility, and as an antidote to pessimistic academic publishing industry pressures.

Open access publishing is a hopeful mission, and whilst Schopenhauer might not be on our side with the optimistic and positive framing philosophically – I think he would see its value in helping to build communities of readers and authors in this moment of opportunity.