Abstract
Abstract This special issue of Cultural Science Journal is devoted to the report of a groundbreaking experiment in re-coordinating global markets for specialist scholarly books and enabling the knowledge commons: the Knowledge Unlatched proof-of-concept pilot. The pilot took place between January 2012 and September 2014. It involved libraries, publishers, authors, readers and research funders in the process of developing and testing a global library consortium model for supporting Open Access books. The experiment established that authors, librarians, publishers and research funding agencies can work together in powerful new ways to enable open access; that doing so is cost effective; and that a global library consortium model has the potential dramatically to widen access to the knowledge and ideas contained in book-length scholarly works.
Highlights
This special issue of Cultural Science Journal is devoted to the report of a groundbreaking experiment in re-coordinating global markets for specialist scholarly books and enabling the knowledge commons: the Knowledge Unlatched proof-of-concept pilot
Access to the knowledge and ideas contained in book-length academic publications is being limited by high cover prices, analogue formats and the persistence of business models that depend on closed licensing
Knowledge Unlatched (KU) was established as a not-for-profit company in 2012 with the goal of enabling a more effective monograph ecosystem. It sought to create a sustainable route to Open Access (OA) for book-length publications by helping libraries from all over the world to share the costs of OA for professionally published scholarly books
Summary
Mandates to make the scientific journal literature available via OA to a global audience are growing while the Humanities and Social Science monographs remain locked behind paywalls. Knowledge Unlatched (KU) seeks to demonstrate that the combined global purchases of academic libraries is sufficient to cover the first copy costs of producing new books – and thereby create a path to Open Access for this body of literature. This model has the potential to transform access to the knowledge and ideas contained in scholarly books and enables libraries to act as catalysts in the shift towards Open Access. The Pilot Collection is the first step towards creating a sustainable path to Open Access (OA) for Humanities and Social Sciences monographs. Publishers want to explore Open Access monographs to understand the dynamics and to be able to offer their authors an option
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