Almost 13,000 downloads of KU Pilot Collection titles so far
Summary
On 11 March 2014 Knowledge Unlatched Pilot Collection books became available for anyone in the world to read or download for free on a Creative Commons licence. This was the culmination of a behind-the-scenes process of loading the books onto our partner host platforms: OAPEN and HathiTrust. The books became live on the OAPEN platform first – followed soon after by HathiTrust. The final book in the collection was published and made OA on 2nd September so is not yet included in the below statistics.
You can view the list of titles and download them via the KU collections website here.
The period covered by the data is from 11 March to 31 August 2014. The data provided below pertains to the downloads on OAPEN’s website only and is COUNTER compliant. This means that raw download figures have been filtered according to a standard methodology, in order to ensure that the numbers represent real downloads rather than the activity of online bots. OAPEN work with IRUS-UK, a Jisc-funded repository and infrastructure service.
Stats by Collection
Published titles in Collection: 28 (only 27 included in the below stats due to unlatching date)
Total number of downloads: 12,763
Mean average number of downloads per week: 1,064
Mean average number of downloads per book/week: 40
Readers in at least 138 countries downloaded books from the collection.
Stats by Title
Mean average number of downloads: 473 (Range per book: 59 – 1,219 each)
Global impact
Number of countries downloading KU titles: 138*
*The country of origin of 59 downloads could not be identified.
Mean average number of downloads by country: 92
Top 20 countries:
| COUNTRY | NUMBER OF DOWNLOADS | PERCENTAGE OF TOTAL |
|---|---|---|
| 1. United States | 3,401 | 27% |
| 2. United Kingdom | 1,448 | 11% |
| 3. Germany | 1,229 | 10% |
| 4. China | 938 | 7% |
| 5. Canada | 550 | 4% |
| 6. Australia | 530 | 4% |
| 7. France | 453 | 4% |
| 8. Ukraine | 422 | 3% |
| 9. The Netherlands | 405 | 3% |
| 10. India | 227 | 2% |
| 11. Israel | 180 | 1% |
| 12. Indonesia | 139 | 1% |
| 13. Iran | 126 | 1% |
| 14. Poland | 122 | 1% |
| 15. Italy | 116 | 1% |
| 16. Belgium | 115 | 1% |
| 17. Switzerland | 106 | 1% |
| 18. Spain | 105 | 1% |
| 19. Russia | 99 | 1% |
| 20. Ireland | 91 | 1% |
| Rest of world | 1,961 | 15% |
A more comprehensive analysis and further usage data will be included in the full KU Pilot Report, which is due for release soon. If you would like to receive an email when the report is published, please fill out this form.
KU is also working with HathiTrust to gather usage data.
All but one of the books in the KU Pilot Collection are being made available on Creative Commons Non-Commercial licences that allow for sharing with others, as long as it is for non-commercial purposes. This means that users have permission to share PDFs with each other directly via email or messenger. It also means that the books can be made available for download for platforms other than OAPEN and HathiTrust, which KU is partnering with directly. One book is on a CC BY ND licence which allows others to use commercially.
This approach to licencing is already helping to increase the reach of the KU Pilot Collection titles. Unglue.it has posted the books in the Pilot Collection to the Internet Archive, increasing their visibility and discoverability and helping to promote the KU project and the publishers that are engaging with it.
The flip side of allowing much wider sharing of KU books is that gathering comprehensive usage data becomes much more challenging. For now we can say with confidence that the download figures being gathered by OAPEN and HathiTrust are just the tip of the iceberg!
So, join in the Open Access movement and have a read of the KU Pilot Collection books today!
