Knowledge Unlatched

Knowledge Unlatched

Knowledge Unlatched (KU) is an award-winning not-for-profit organisation registered as a community interest company in the United Kingdom. It is piloting a global library consortium approach to funding open access books.

History

Knowledge Unlatched was established in September 2012 by publisher and social entrepreneur Frances Pinter. Knowledge Unlatched was the formalisation of the ‘Global Library Consortium’ model for supporting open access books, developed by Pinter as a response to a protracted crisis in monograph publishing and the opportunities presented by digital technology and open access.

Pinter first aired her vision for a Global Library Consortium approach to supporting open access monograph publishing at the Charleston Conference in 2010.

In September 2011 Pinter embarked on a speaking tour of Australia. Her tour included a keynote presentation on academic publishing and the future of the monograph at Queensland University of Technology, arranged by Dr. Lucy Montgomery, who would go on to become Deputy Director of Knowledge Unlatched. While at QUT, Pinter met with DVC for Technology, Library and Information Services, Professor Tom Cochrane. This trip played a key role in securing support for Knowledge Unlatched from three founding Australian libraries: Queensland University of Technology, The University of Melbourne and The University of Western Australia.

In 2012, then Harvard University Librarian Robert Darnton hosted a meeting of leaders of major US libraries and academic presses to discuss the Global Library Consortium concept.

In 2015, KU was fundamental in the announcement that Google Scholar will start to index Open Access books hosted by OAPEN.

Business model

Knowledge Unlatched is piloting a collective procurement approach to open access books. The model put forward by Frances Pinter in 2011 depends on many libraries from around the world sharing the payment of a single title fee to a publisher, in return for a book being made available on a Creative Commons licence via the open access repository service "Open Access Publishing in European Networks" (OAPEN) and the HathiTrust Digital Library as a fully downloadable PDF.

Because the title fee is a fixed amount, as more libraries participate in Knowledge Unlatched, the per-library cost of securing open access for each book is reduced.

Pilot Collection

In October 2013, Knowledge Unlatched launched its Pilot Collection, intended to be a ‘proof of concept’ exercise to gauge the willingness of libraries and publishers to support a collective procurement approach to open access books.

The Pilot Collection consists of 28 new Literature, History, Politics and Media & Communication titles from the following scholarly publishers: Amsterdam University Press, Bloomsbury Academic, Brill Publishers, Cambridge University Press, De Gruyter, Duke University Press, Edinburgh University Press, Liverpool University Press, Manchester University Press, Purdue University Press, Rutgers University Press, Temple University Press and University of Michigan Press.

In May 2014, Knowledge Unlatched published its Pilot Progress Summary Report with preliminary findings from the Pilot project.

Just under 300 libraries from around the world agreed to support the Pilot Collection, therefore publishers were paid a pre-agreed fee ('title fee') in return for making the books available on a Creative Commons licence via OAPEN and HathiTrust immediately upon publication.

As more than the minimum number of 200 libraries signed up for the Pilot Collection, the cost per-library of supporting the collection was adjusted down from $1680 to $1195. This works out to an average of $43 per title whereby the target average was $60.

The geographic spread of the participating Pilot libraries was: 46% from North America, 26% from the UK and 28% from the rest of the world.

Round 2

In October 2015 the launch of a second collection of 78 new Humanities and Social Sciences books curated into eight packages (six subject-specific and two published-specific) was announced. Libraries have until 31 January 2016 to pledge their participation.

Subject areas

Books currently available through Knowledge Unlatched are in the fields of Humanities and Social Sciences. The Pilot Collection concentrated on History, Politics, Literature and Media & Communications, with Round 2 adding a further package covering Anthropology.

Awards

In September 2015, Knowledge Unlatched won the Curtin University Award for Best Innovation in Education 2015. The competition attracted a record 46 applications from across Curtin University with 12 applicants shortlisted to present to a panel of judges looking at novelty, level of development, market potential and competitive advantage.

In June 2014, Knowledge Unlatched was selected as the 2014 winner of the IFLA/Brill Open Access Award. The jury for the prize awarded by the International Federation of Library Associations and Institutions (IFLA) and Brill Publishers voted unanimously for Knowledge Unlatched, recognising it as the most outstanding and game-changing initiative in the field.

The jury said that they are ‘deeply impressed with the simplicity and elegance of the original concept, with the daring scope of the project, bringing together libraries, publishers and other organisations from around the world, and with the highly successful outcome of the pilot phase that tested the concept.'

Knowledge Unlatched was named by Outsell, Inc., as one of their 10 to companies to watch.

See also

• Open Book Publishers

External links

• Official website
• Official KU Pilot Collection website
• KU Pilot Progress Summary Report