Publisher engagement with the library community has evolved considerably over the past decades. The growth of consortial licensing, the emergence of transformative agreements, and the increasing complexity of open access policy implementation have all created conditions in which publishers and libraries must work together not only as commercial counterparties but also as operational partners in the infrastructure of scholarly communication. And yet, despite this increased interdependence, many publishers have not developed a library relations strategy — a deliberate, sustained commitment to engaging with the library community in ways that are substantive, reciprocal, and structurally supported, operating alongside sales relationships.
What a Library Relations Strategy Comprises
Library relations, as I am using the term here, refers to the organizational capacity to engage with the library community in ways that generate mutual understanding, inform publisher decision-making, and sustain trust over time. This is distinct from, though related to, the commercial relationship between publishers and libraries. A library relations strategy may complement and support commercial goals, but it is not reducible to them, and its value cannot be measured solely by renewal rates or financial outcomes.
In practice, a library relations strategy is built from several distinct mechanisms, each serving different purposes and operating at different levels of engagement.
Library advisory boards are perhaps the most fundamental of these mechanisms. When designed and operated effectively, advisory boards bring together librarians across institution types, sizes, and geographic contexts to engage with publishers on strategic questions, such as the direction of a platform, a contractual strategy, or the implications of a policy change. The critical aspect is that the engagement must be genuinely advisory. An advisory board that is consulted after decisions have been made, or whose input is consistently acknowledged but not demonstrably incorporated into publisher decisions, will be recognized as such by its members and will generate neither trust nor useful intelligence. And, over time, librarians will withdraw or withhold their insights. Librarians who serve on advisory boards are, as I have experienced in my own service in such roles, also gaining professional knowledge — about how publishers make decisions, about the organizational constraints that shape product development and licensing, etc. — that they could not readily acquire otherwise.
Development partnerships represent a deeper form of engagement, in which librarians are brought into the product development process before decisions have been finalized. A publisher developing a discovery interface or workflow tool, for instance, might convene a small group of electronic resources or systems librarians to review prototypes and provide structured feedback during the development cycle rather than after launch. This kind of engagement requires a degree of openness that may feel uncomfortable — it involves sharing work that is incomplete, soliciting feedback that may be critical, and building sufficient time into the development process to act on what is learned. The librarians who participate in such partnerships gain a more detailed understanding of the complexity of platform development and the constraints within which publishers operate. In my own experience as a development partner, this has informed my understanding of researcher needs and how I evaluate vendor offerings.
User groups may also be a powerful library relations mechanism for publishers and platforms. Instead of engaging a small number of librarians on strategic or developmental questions, user groups convene the broader community of librarians who work regularly with a publisher’s products, creating a sustained channel for peer exchange and ongoing feedback. The most effective user groups function as professional communities — spaces in which librarians share experiences, surface common problems, and develop collective responses — and not only as managed forums for publisher communication. The distinction matters because user groups that function primarily as communication channels generate little of the candid, substantive engagement that makes them valuable as a library relations mechanism. In my experience, a user group in which librarians feel able to speak candidly about what is not working, and in which publisher staff are present to listen and respond, provides a qualitatively different kind of intelligence than any formal survey instrument can capture.
Each of these mechanisms generates different kinds of value for the publisher. Advisory boards surface strategic implications that may not be visible from inside the organization. Development partnerships generate usability and workflow knowledge that complements internal testing. User groups provide ongoing, unfiltered feedback on how products actually function in library environments.
A publisher that has developed a library relations strategy has built a substantial organizational infrastructure for learning from the library community. A publisher that has none is making decisions about products, policies, and licensing structures without access to perspectives that are directly relevant to those decisions.
Barriers Publishers May Face
It would be misleading to suggest that building a library relations strategy is straightforward. Several structural barriers make it genuinely difficult, and acknowledging them is a precondition to addressing them.
The most fundamental question is organizational location and reporting structure. Library relations work, if it is to function as described above, requires a degree of independence from the commercial imperatives that govern the publisher-library relationship at the point of negotiation and renewal. A library relations function that is organizationally housed within and evaluated by the same metrics as the sales or account management function will, in practice, be shaped by those imperatives regardless of its stated mandate. Staff who are evaluated on renewal rates will rationally prioritize the information and relationships that support renewals. The feedback loop that library relations is intended to create — from the library community back into product, policy, and licensing decisions — will be crowded out when the organizational incentives point in a different direction.
Metrics present a related challenge. The outcomes that a library relations strategy is intended to generate (e.g., trust, credibility, the kind of relationship in which a librarian will contact a publisher proactively when a problem is emerging rather than waiting until it has become a cancellation decision) are not easily quantified. Meetings and attendance can be tracked, but whether the input from those boards has influenced a product decision, and whether that influence has, in turn, affected the library community’s experience of and confidence in the publisher, is considerably more difficult to assess. Publishers who are serious about library relations must be willing to defend investments in outcomes whose returns are qualitative and whose time horizon extends beyond a fiscal year.
Staffing presents a further challenge. Effective library relations require staff who have genuine standing within the library community and have sufficient organizational access within the publisher to function as effective advocates for the feedback they receive. The former, without the latter, produces a function that can credibly represent the publisher in library contexts but lacks the organizational standing to influence decisions when librarian perspectives conflict with internal priorities. This combination of external credibility and internal access is uncommon and building it requires deliberate attention to staff and consultant hiring and to organizational design.
Getting Started
For publishers not yet able to make significant resource commitments to library relations, community engagement — participation by publisher staff in the intellectual life of the library and scholarly communication community — can serve as a starting point. This type of effort does not require the organizational infrastructure that advisory boards demand or the commitments that development partnerships entail, and it can be pursued incrementally as capacity develops. Presenting findings on questions of shared interest and engaging substantively in sessions, in contrast to primarily managing an exhibit presence, builds credibility and standing within the community. This kind of engagement also creates the conditions under which more intensive mechanisms become more productive; a publisher known in the library community as a thoughtful contributor to shared professional questions is better positioned to convene an advisory board, recruit development partners, and sustain user groups.
A Consequential Investment
The library-publisher relationship is currently undergoing significant change across multiple dimensions simultaneously. Transformative agreements have restructured the commercial relationship between publishers and libraries, making their operational partnership more complex and consequential. Open access mandates from funders and governments — including those stemming from the 2022 OSTP Nelson Memo in the United States and from Plan S in Europe — are accelerating the pace of change in ways that require publishers and libraries to develop a shared understanding of implementation requirements. Research integrity concerns, as I have argued elsewhere, are creating new demands for publisher-institution collaboration that extend beyond the existing contractual frameworks.
In this environment, the library community is not simply a purchasing constituency. Librarians participate, through organizations such as SPARC, IFLA, and COAR, in the policy conversations that shape the conditions under which scholarly publishing operates. Librarians conduct and publish research on serials pricing, licensing practices, and the economics of open access that informs both institutional decision-making and public policy. Librarians are, in many instances, the primary interpreters of publisher policies for the faculty and researcher communities whose publishing decisions publishers rely on.
Publishers who have invested in genuine library relations — who have built advisory boards that function strategically, development partnerships that generate real feedback, and user groups that sustain candid ongoing exchange — have, as a consequence, accumulated institutional knowledge about the library community that is difficult to replicate. That knowledge informs better products, more workable licensing frameworks, and more effective policy communication. It also means that when a difficult conversation needs to happen — about a pricing change, a platform transition, or an open access policy with implications that were not fully anticipated — there is a relational foundation from which to have it.
Publishers who have not invested in a library relations strategy are operating without access to perspectives and knowledge directly relevant to their decisions, in an environment where the impacts of those decisions are increasingly visible and consequential for the communities they serve.
The publishers who invest in library relations are making a bet that trust is a strategic asset. Given how the library-publisher relationship is evolving, that bet looks like a good one.
AI Disclosures: Claude was used as a conversational interlocutor in developing the essay. Grammarly was used to polish the writing.
