Knowledge Unlatched

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Knowledge Unlatched
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Website https://knowledgeunlatched.org/

Knowledge Unlatched (KU) is an Open Access service provider registered as a for-profit GmbH in Berlin, Germany, and owned by multinational commercial publishing company Wiley as of December 2021. [1] It offers a crowdfunding model to support a variety of Open Access book and journal content packages as well as the financial funding of partnerships.

Contents

History

Knowledge Unlatched was established in September 2012 by publisher and social entrepreneur Frances Pinter. It 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 models.

Pinter first aired her vision for a Global Library Consortium approach to supporting Open Access monograph publishing at the Charleston Conference in 2010. [2] In September 2011, she embarked on a speaking tour of Australia. Her tour included a keynote presentation [3] on academic publishing and the future of the monograph at Queensland University of Technology, [3] arranged by Lucy Montgomery, who would go on to become deputy director of Knowledge Unlatched. [4]

In 2016, the legal structure of Knowledge Unlatched (KU) was changed from a British Community Interest Company (CIC) to a German GmbH (limited liability company). In that same year, Sven Fund acquired part of KU CIC's assets, transferring them into a for-profit company, Knowledge Unlatched GmbH, which is 100% owned by the consultancy fullstopp GmbH. Sven Fund is managing director of both companies. [5] Pinter, the founder of KU CIC, was planning to retire in that period and became director of the then legally independent research unit, KU Research, which operates under the former founding organisation's name, KU CIC. [6]

Business model

In its first two collections (the Pilot and Round 2), Knowledge Unlatched piloted a collective procurement approach to Open Access books. The model [7] put forward by 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 via a Creative Commons licence through one of Open Access repository services, such as the Open Research Library, [8] "Open Access Publishing in European Networks" (OAPEN) and the HathiTrust Digital Library as a fully downloadable PDF or EPUB file.

According to multiple sources, Knowledge Unlatched is cited among other innovative publishing-market initiatives focused on the Open Access sector that have been successful in pooling the funding from subscribing libraries for covering the costs of transitioning monographs or journals into Gold Open Access, which removes access barriers to readers around the world. [9]

KU Open Funding

KU Open Funding is a database for financing Open Access books. It enables scientists and libraries to compare offerings from different publishers. Suitable offers can be found on the basis of more than 20 criteria, such as the subject area, the services of publishers, forms of licensing and publication costs. If the latter accepts the manuscript for publication after quality control, KU organises the approval and handling of payment with the library. More than twenty publishers such as Berghahn Books, Duke University Press, Intellect, University of Michigan Press, Taylor & Francis, Transcript Verlag and Ubiquity Press participated with their Open Access offerings during the launch in November 2018. [10]

KU Partners

Knowledge Unlatched partners with several open access initiatives, which includes collects funding. To date KU has partnered up with 12 different initiatives including OAPEN, IntechOpen, Language Science Press, the Peter Lang publishing group, and Transcript Open Library Political Science. [11] As predatory publishers [12] represent a concern for the Open Access sector, Knowledge Unlatched is not involved directly in quality assurance procedures, for which publishers bear sole responsibility. This topic is widely discussed in relation to the publication of scholarly articles. Yet with regard to both academic monographs and scholarly papers, publisher-level review procedures and industry-wide quality assurance mechanisms exist. In addition, divergent opinions exist concerning the harm of predatory publishing, particularly in relation to the role of Open Access in rendering scientific and scholarly knowledge widely accessible as a public good, as Martin Paul Eve and Ernesto Priego have argued in their article. [13] As the role of preprint servers during the COVID-19 crisis indicates, Open Access is not antithetical to maintaining quality controls with regard to disseminating research results. [14]

Awards

Knowledge Unlatched was shortlisted for the ALPSP Awards for Innovation in Publishing 2016. [15]

In September 2015, Knowledge Unlatched won the Curtin University Award for Best Innovation in Education 2015. [16] 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. [17] The jury for the prize awarded by the International Federation of Library Associations and Institutions (IFLA) and Brill Publishers voted unanimously for Knowledge Unlatched. [18]

In February 2015, Knowledge Unlatched was named by Outsell, Inc., as one of their 10 to companies to watch. [19] [20]

See also

Related Research Articles

<span class="mw-page-title-main">Open access</span> Research publications distributed freely online

Open access (OA) is a set of principles and a range of practices through which research outputs are distributed online, free of access charges or other barriers. With open access strictly defined, or libre open access, barriers to copying or reuse are also reduced or removed by applying an open license for copyright.

A hybrid open-access journal is a subscription journal in which some of the articles are open access. This status typically requires the payment of a publication fee to the publisher in order to publish an article open access, in addition to the continued payment of subscriptions to access all other content. Strictly speaking, the term "hybrid open-access journal" is incorrect, possibly misleading, as using the same logic such journals could also be called "hybrid subscription journals". Simply using the term "hybrid access journal" is accurate.

<span class="mw-page-title-main">Crossref</span> Organization

Crossref is a nonprofit open digital infrastructure organisation for the global scholarly research community. Uniquely and persistently recording and connecting knowledge through open metadata and identifiers for all research objects such as grants and articles. It is the largest digital object identifier (DOI) Registration Agency of the International DOI Foundation. It has 19,000 members from 150 countries representing publishers, libraries, research institutions, and funders and was launched in early 2000 as a cooperative effort among publishers to enable persistent cross-platform citation linking in online academic journals. As of July 2023, Crossref identifies and connects 150 million records of metadata about research objects made openly available for reuse without restriction. They facilitate an average of 1.1 billion DOI resolutions every month, and they see 1 billion queries of the metadata every month.

<span class="mw-page-title-main">De Gruyter</span> German academic publisher

Walter de Gruyter GmbH, known as De Gruyter, is a German scholarly publishing house specializing in academic literature.

<span class="mw-page-title-main">Duke University Press</span> University press

Duke University Press is an academic publisher and university press affiliated with Duke University. It was founded in 1921 by William T. Laprade as The Trinity College Press.. In 1926 Duke University Press was formally established. Ernest Seeman became the first director of DUP, followed by Henry Dwyer (1929–1944), W.T. LaPrade (1944–1951), Ashbel Brice (1951–1981), Richard Rowson (1981–1990), Larry Malley (1990–1993), Stanley Fish and Steve Cohn (1994–1998), Steve Cohn (1998–2019). Writer Dean Smith is the current director of the press.

The University of Michigan Press is a new university press (NUP) that is a part of Michigan Publishing at the University of Michigan Library. It publishes 170 new titles each year in the humanities and social sciences. Titles from the press have earned numerous awards, including Lambda Literary Awards, the PEN/Faulkner Award, the Joe A. Callaway Award, and the Nautilus Book Award. The press has published works by authors who have been awarded the Pulitzer Prize, the National Humanities Medal and the Nobel Prize in Economics.

<span class="mw-page-title-main">Edinburgh University Press</span> British publisher of academic books and journals

Edinburgh University Press is a scholarly publisher of academic books and journals, based in Edinburgh, Scotland.

<span class="mw-page-title-main">Manchester University Press</span> British university press

Manchester University Press is the university press of the University of Manchester, England and a publisher of academic books and journals. Manchester University Press has developed into an international publisher. It maintains its links with the University.

<span class="mw-page-title-main">Frances Pinter</span>

Frances Pinter was the founder and executive director of Knowledge Unlatched, a (then) not-for-profit company creating a global library consortium enabling sustainable open access academic book publishing. She was also the CEO of Manchester University Press from 2013-2016.

Amsterdam University Press (AUP) is a university press that was founded in 1992 by the University of Amsterdam in the Netherlands. It is based on the university press model and operates on a not-for-profit basis. AUP publishes scholarly and trade titles in both Dutch and English, predominantly in the humanities and social sciences and has a publishing list of over 1400 titles. It also publishes multiple scholarly journals according to the open access publishing model. From 2000 until 2013, the AUP published the journal Academische Boekengids with book reviews written by editors from multiple Dutch universities.

Berghahn Books is a New York and Oxford–based publisher of scholarly books and academic journals in the humanities and social sciences, with a special focus on social and cultural anthropology, European history, politics, and film and media studies. It was founded in 1994 by Marion Berghahn.

<span class="mw-page-title-main">Brill Publishers</span> Dutch international academic publisher

Brill Academic Publishers, also known as E. J. Brill, Koninklijke Brill, Brill, is a Dutch international academic publisher of books and journals.

Open Book Publishers (OBP) is an open access academic book publisher based in the United Kingdom. It is a non-profit social enterprise and community interest company (CIC) that promotes open access for academic monographs, edited collections, critical editions and textbooks in the Humanities, Social Sciences, Mathematics and Science. All OBP books are peer-reviewed.

<span class="mw-page-title-main">Open Library of Humanities</span> Open access academic publisher

The Open Library of Humanities is a nonprofit, diamond open access publisher in the humanities and social sciences founded by Martin Paul Eve and Caroline Edwards. Founded in 2015, OLH publishes 27 scholarly journals as of 2022, including a mega journal, also called Open Library of Humanities, which was modeled on PLOS but not affiliated with it.

An open-access monograph is a scholarly publication usually made openly available online with an open license. These books are freely accessible to the public, typically via the internet. They are part of the open access movement.

The following is a timeline of the international movement for open access to scholarly communication.

<span class="mw-page-title-main">Open access in Germany</span> Overview of the culture and regulation of open access in Germany

Open access to scholarly communication in Germany has evolved rapidly since the early 2000s. Publishers Beilstein-Institut, Copernicus Publications, De Gruyter, Knowledge Unlatched, Leibniz Institute for Psychology Information, ScienceOpen, Springer Nature, and Universitätsverlag Göttingen belong to the international Open Access Scholarly Publishers Association.

<span class="mw-page-title-main">Open access in the Netherlands</span> Overview of the culture and regulation of open access in the Netherlands

Scholarly communication of the Netherlands published in open access form can be found by searching the National Academic Research and Collaboration Information System (NARCIS). The web portal was developed in 2004 by the Data Archiving and Networked Services of the Netherlands Organisation for Scientific Research and Royal Netherlands Academy of Arts and Sciences.

Open access scholarly communication of Norway can be searched via the Norwegian Open Research Archive (NORA). "A national repository consortium, BIBSYS Brage, operates shared electronic publishing system on behalf of 56 institutions." Cappelen Damm Akademisk, Nordic Open Access Scholarly Publishing, University of Tromsø, and Universitetsforlaget belong to the Open Access Scholarly Publishers Association. Norwegian signatories to the international "Open Access 2020" campaign, launched in 2016, include CRIStin, Norsk institutt for bioøkonomi, Norwegian Institute of Palaeography and Historical Philology, Norwegian University of Science and Technology, Oslo and Akershus University College of Applied Sciences, University of Tromsø, University of Bergen, University of Oslo, and Wikimedia Norge.

Baishideng Publishing Group is a publisher of medical journals based in Pleasanton, California. It was established on January 15, 1993, and originally published only one journal: the Chinese-language Journal of New Digestology. Its second journal was the World Journal of Gastroenterology, originally launched in 1995 as the China National Journal of New Gastroenterology. As of 2017, the company published 43 journals, 42 in English and one in Chinese.

References

  1. ↑ "Wiley Acquires Open Access Innovator Knowledge Unlatched". 2 December 2021.
  2. ↑ "No Shelf Required blog". Archived from the original on 2016-03-04. Retrieved 2014-01-07.
  3. 1 2 ACU Research Net
  4. ↑ The KU Team
  5. ↑ Knöchelmann, Marcel (2018-10-03). "Knowledge Unlatched, failed transparency, and the commercialisation of open access book publishing". LSE Impact Blog.
  6. ↑ "Knowledge Unlatched – Scaling Up In 2016 – Knowledge Unlatched". www.knowledgeunlatched.org. 11 March 2016. Retrieved 2018-11-15.
  7. ↑ The Wellcome Trust
  8. ↑ Open Research Library
  9. ↑ Maron, Nancy; Kennison, Rebecca; Bracke, Paul; Hall, Nathan; Gilman, Isaac; Malenfant, Kara; Roh, Charlotte; Shorish, Yasmeen (June 2019). "Open and Equitable Scholarly Communications: Creating a More Inclusive Future". Copyright, Fair Use, Scholarly Communication, Etc. Retrieved 2020-08-21.
  10. ↑ "KU Open Funding simplifies financing of Open Access books – Knowledge Unlatched". www.knowledgeunlatched.org. 5 October 2018. Retrieved 2018-11-15.
  11. ↑ "KU Partners – Knowledge Unlatched". Knowledge Unhatched. Retrieved November 15, 2018.
  12. ↑ "List of Predatory Publishers" . Retrieved December 17, 2019.
  13. ↑ "Who is Actually Harmed by Predatory Publishers?" . Retrieved 6 August 2020.
  14. ↑ "How the COVID-19 crisis has prompted a revolution in scientific publishing" . Retrieved 7 August 2020.
  15. ↑ ALPSP Website Archived 2015-12-11 at the Wayback Machine
  16. ↑ "Curtin University Award for Best Innovation in Education 2015". Archived from the original on 2016-03-06. Retrieved 2015-10-28.
  17. ↑ IFLA/Brill Open Access Award Press Release
  18. ↑ IFLA/Brill Open Access Award website
  19. ↑ Outsell, Inc. names Knowledge Unlatched in their 10 companies to watch list
  20. ↑ "Outsell, Inc 'Humanities and Social Sciences Publishing: Market Size, Share, Forecast, and Trends' report". Archived from the original on 2015-02-04. Retrieved 2015-02-04.
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