It’s been a busy start to 2013. With the appearance of a number of major mandates in the last half-year, and more to follow shortly, it is hardly surprising that the political landscape has become extremely complicated. Knowledge Unlatched has, as a result, had a higher profile than ever with numerous opportunities to participate in discussions about open access and books.

Library Recruitment

To date, Knowledge Unlatched has been working with library consortia to familiarise librarians with Knowledge Unlatched and its goals. Frances Pinter has been invited to speak at the ICOLC meeting in Toronto in April, which will be an important opportunity to raise the project’s profile and to engage with library consortia further.  Once our new staff members are on board, recruitment at an individual library level is expected to gather pace.

Developments in Germany

We are now working closely with the Max Planck Society and are scheduled to hold a one-day meeting in June on Knowledge Unlatched for university librarians from across Germany.

Publisher Recruitment

We have been working with thirteen publishers in the lead-up to the launch of our first batch of Knowledge Unlatched titles. These publishers represent a broad spectrum of presses, including large and small, commercial and non-commercial operations:

Michigan UP

Temple UP

Rutgers UP

Brill

Bloomsbury Academic

Amsterdam UP

Liverpool UP

Penn State UP

Duke UP

Purdue UP

DeGruyter

UN Publications

Open Book Publishers

Discussions are underway with other publishers and we look forward to announcing new sign-ups as paperwork is finalised.

Advisory Boards

The list of Knowledge Unlatched Advisory Board members is now on the website and can be accessed via the partners page. We are looking to recruit another publisher and a few academics for the Advisory Board. If you would like to put yourself forward, or suggest someone else please let us know by emailing Lucy Montgomery.

We are also setting up a Pilot Implementation Group to guide us through the first stages of our launch in the US and will be establishing similar groups for other regions.

Our Board of Directors, an experienced team of senior professionals from a range of backgrounds, provides Knowledge Unlatched with valuable guidance and oversight.  A list of their names can be found here.  Further biographical information will be posted soon.

Upcoming Engagements

In addition to events mentioned above, upcoming speaking engagements for Frances include the Committee on Institutional Cooperation (CIC) meeting in Columbus Ohio in May and the American Association of University Presses (AAUP) meeting in Boston in June as well as a meeting on Books for Development at the George Washington University, also in June.

Read/Watch/Listen

Elucidate, the UK eInformation group’s journal, has published an article on the Knowledge Unlatched model. Click here to watch Frances’s keynote address at the launch of the AHRC Center for Copyright and New Business Models (CREATe) in Glasgow.  A video of Frances, paired with Eric Hellman, at the Academic Publishers in Europe (APE) meeting in Berlin earlier in the year is also available here.

Research

A critical research agenda is a key component of the Knowledge Unlatched model.  Research Director Dr. Lucy Montgomery has been working closely with specialists in metadata and impact metrics, law, policy and digital transformation to scope this agenda and to win the funding that will support it.

During 2013 Knowledge Unlatched will run a series of three research workshops on the challenges associated with a transition to open access for monographs, as well as the opportunities for critical research arising from the Knowledge Unlatched pilot. These events will bring academics, librarians and publishers together to work through challenges facing scholarly books and to consider the role that Knowledge Unlatched might play in fostering a more effective scholarly communication landscape.

The first workshop will be co-hosted by Professor Peter Suber at the Berkman Center for Internet and Society at Harvard University. The second event will take place in London in early September, followed by a final event at Queensland University of Technology in Brisbane at the end of October.