Please add your thoughts on the fundraising strategies.
(ITM)
- Sorry about the obvious: write a grant to a foundation or other body. I thought about the NIH Challenge Awards but I don't see anything there that would seem to fit - perhaps others can check to be sure.
- See whether a professional organization, or series of professional organizations (ASCO, ESMO others) might be willing to provide support - collectively it might amount to something, but I don't think one would see big bucks emerging.
- Approach a pharmaceutical or other cancer-related manufacturing corporation to sponsor part or all of the program
- Consider a Google like approach whereby appropriate adverstisements are inserted at some point of the mining process and can be paid for.
- Where books are cited, add a link to Amazon where the book can be purchased, which gives a fraction of the retail price to the owner of the website from which the purchaser reached Amazon.
- Consider putting a request for donations on each or selected pages of the website as does Wikipedia
- Approach the American Cancer Society
- Consider a government source see UK site:
- Check out resources for the Open Resources movement other than Hewlett - there is info on the web on this e.g. see: and this pdf and this- there is probably lots of repetition here, but N.B.from the last quoted site:
Institutions launching OER programmes might also need to look into different revenue models for the long
term stability and viability of their initiative. To this end some alternative models identified by Dholakia
(2006) might be considered, such as:
• The Replacement model, where OER replaces other use and can benefit from the cost savings
which is a result of the replacement. It was noted though that this model has a natural limit since
it can only generate the same amount of resources as it replaces.
• The Foundation, Donation or Endowment model, where the funding for the operations are
provided by an external actor such as foundations. This model was primarily seen as a start up
model that will most probably not be viable in the long run. It might be transferred into a
Government support model, which could be a long-term option in some (mostly European?)
countries but not others.
• The Segmentation model, where the provider, simultaneously with resources for free, also
provides “value-added” services to user segments and charges them for these services – such as
sales of paper copies, training and user support, ask-an-expert services etc. This model, together
with the conversion model, is among the most used in the education sector.
• The Conversion model, where “you give something away for free and then convert the consumer
to a paying customer”.
• The Voluntary support model, which is based on fund-raising campaigns. Another version of this
model is the Membership model where a coalition of interested parties – organisations or
individuals – is invited to contribute a certain sum as seed money or on an annual basis.
• The Contributor-Pay model where the contributors pay the cost of maintaining the contribution,
which the provider makes available for free. This model is used to give OA to scientific
publications and might work also for OER.
I do not think this likely to be something amenable to fund raising from the public (except the user of OERC). In fact, I see why this page was blank. Looking through the Foundation society might be worthwhile, but this is not an area that lends itself obviously to standard fund-raising methods - one really needs organizations like Hewlett which have already demonstrated an interest in the open access movement.
