Policy Commons Newsletter: March 2021

Greetings!

First, a word of thanks. Since we launched in beta last November, your feedback has been vital.  Policy Commons would not be what it is today without our early registrants, first institutional members, and advisers. Thank you. We launched, listened, and here’s what we’ve been up to.

More rare and hard-to-find content
Reports from small, specialized, and regional organizations don’t often make it to the top of general-purpose search engines, but you can find them easily in Policy Commons. Check out the 1,000+ reports we recently added from Scotland’s premier think tank, The Fraser of Allander Institute, and 5 reports for policymakers from the Network of African Science Academies. Every year, some NGOs lose the struggle to maintain funding, close their doors and shut down their websites. We recently added 10,000+ documents drawn from 200 inactive organizations — including this report which contains lessons for a post-COVID world from the Center for Effective Government, which closed its doors in 2016.

More premium content.
Our premium collection now includes the complete catalog of publications from the Council of Europe, the Continent’s leading human rights organization. More than 1,000 books are available for download in Policy Commons.

Follow and Alert Service.
Interested in specific subjects like single-use plastics or Brexit? Be the first to know when new content is added by clicking on the Follow button. You can follow any one of our thousands of topics, organizations, and even your favorite search results in Policy Commons. When a new title is added to something you follow, you'll receive an email alert.

What's next?
Many of you have expressed an interest in African content. We currently include 400 titles from the African Books Collective and are actively working to index 200 more NGOs and think tanks based in Africa. 

Help us build it further! 
Contribute files or links using the upload tool in Policy Commons! Reply to this email if you know of organizations, archives or repositories we should include!

Bye-bye beta
Policy Commons will be coming out of its beta phase on April 2nd. It will remain largely open and anyone can register for free to use it at a basic level. Access to premium content and features will be restricted to members. For details, please consult our website. If your institution is not yet a member, email me to request a free trial or schedule a demo.

We'll be delivering much more in the coming months to make your research stronger, faster, and easier. Until next time, happy searching.

Toby Green 
Publisher, Policy Commons