How do I ask professors to give feedback on my online articles that are based on their work? I am working on a website that contains a list of free courses. My aim is to promote our field (semidefinite programming).
Each course consists of a number of articles.
Each article is built using different resources (books, posts, talks). Those resources are listed in each article.
I strongly believe that participation could improve the work.
For each article, I want to send emails to the professors whose works were used and ask them to give a read the article, check and suggest small improvements if necessary. I will not ask them to write. The participation could be done by mail, github or comments on the website. I will also keep a list of all the participants as a reward to every person who agreed to help (I am trying to find another way to be grateful to participation but).
However, I don't want to feel spammy. Any suggestions on doing that in a good way?
PS: my work is not sponsored by any organization.
I will try to be honest. If I received an email from a random person with whom I had never interacted before, asking me to do work for free, without any recognizable institution/organization/group/... behind that person, then I would consider spam, no matter how well the email was formulated. Sorry.
Getting your name on a random website is not enough of a &quot;reward&quot;. You have to convince people that investing time in your project is valuable to themselves and/or the community at large, not just that it &quot;could improve [your] work&quot;. You also have to convince them that they are not going to sink time in a project that is eventually going to be wasted because it will never gain traction and it is managed by a one-person team that will eventually have other things on their mind.
Think about it this way: you are essentially asking people to conduct a kind of peer review. I would never accept to review papers for a journal run by a single person with no institutional support. This would simply be pointless: a paper published in such a journal has essentially no value, and my effort is almost certainly going to be wasted once the journal inevitably disappears.
I do not think you can &quot;bootstrap&quot; this kind of group project by contacting random unknown people. Start with your colleagues, your peers, your contacts, etc, insist on the importance of outreach once the project starts to take shape, and then let the network expand on its own. If it works then great, if it doesn't then you just had a nice idea but with no audience.