Usage of Knowledge Unlatched titles doubled within one quarter

Berlin, 30th October 2017. The Open Access (OA) books funded through Knowledge Unlatched (KU) have doubled their usage between the second and third quarters 2017. With an aggregate of 228,000 full-text downloads on the OAPEN platform (www.oapen.org) and through the addition of 67,068 chapter downloads on the JSTOR platform (www.jstor.com), KU has been able to deliver on the promise of OA and dramatically increase the visibility of scholarly content by making it available to researchers worldwide free of charge. KU only reports usage on OAPEN and JSTOR, although the Open Access content is also hosted in multiple other places, such as on publisher platforms, in library systems and on the Internet Archive.

“We are delighted to see the KU titles performing so strongly in terms of usage – a clear indicator that the global availability of top quality content from our publishing partners is helping to advance research in the humanities and social sciences”, says Dr. Sven Fund, Managing Director of Knowledge Unlatched. “There is now empirical evidence to libraries around the world that their investments into OA are paying back.”

Through its crowd funding model KU has made 450 monographs from 60 publishers in the humanities and social sciences available in Open Access. In its present funding round, Knowledge Unlatched is seeking to unlatch another 343 titles. The funding is provided by libraries around the world, 400 of whom have already participated in previous rounds.

About Knowledge Unlatched (KU): KU offers free access to scholarly content for every reader across the world. Our online platform provides libraries worldwide with a central place to support Open Access models from leading publishing houses and new OA initiatives.

Contact:

Knowledge Unlatched:

Hannah Schroder, Publicity & Communications,hannah@knowledgeunlatched.org

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