Summary

In March 2014 Knowledge Unlatched started to unlatch books in its Pilot Collection, making them available to 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 titles 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 Pilot Collection was published and made OA on 2 September 2014.

You can view a list of Pilot Collection titles and download them via the KU collections website here.

OAPEN Statistics

The period covered by the data below is from 11 March 2014 to 31 March 2015. As well as the OAPEN statistics, which use COUNTER-compliant methodology to count each book download, the HathiTrust figures below count views per page. The KU Pilot Collection has also been uploaded to the Internet Archive. The Internet Archive’s website does not indicate a starting date to their reporting period.

Stats by Collection

Published titles in Collection: 28
Total number of downloads since 11 March: 29,631
Mean average number of downloads per week: 581

Readers in at least 165 countries downloaded books from the collection.

Stats by Title

Mean average number of total downloads by book: 1058
(Range per book: 221 – 2,200 each)

Global impact

Number of countries downloading KU titles: 165*
*The country of origin for 957 downloads could not be identified.

Mean average number of total downloads by country: 174

 

Top 20 countries:

COUNTRY	NUMBER OF DOWNLOADS	PERCENTAGE OF TOTAL
1. United States	7,335	24.75%
2. United Kingdom	4,148	14%
3. Germany	2,409	8.13%
4. China	2,030	6.85%
5. Canada	1,161	3.92%
6. France	1,041	3.51%
7. Australia	999	3.37%
8. The Netherlands	865	2.92%
9. Ukraine	814	2.75%
10. India	587	1.98%
11. Portugal	454	1.53%
12. Spain	320	1.08%
13. Italy	299	1.01%
14. Iran	290	0.98%
15. Israel	288	0.97%
16. Poland	280	0.94%
17. Indonesia	264	0.89%
18. Turkey	257	0.87%
19. Belgium	226	0.76%
20. Brazil/Ireland/Sweden	215	0.73%
Rest of world	3,860	16.5%

HathiTrust Statistics

The reporting period started on 15 May 2014 and statistics below were gathered until 31 March 2015.

Stats by Collection

Published titles in Collection: 28
Total number of page views via HathiTrust: 5,837
Mean average number of page views per week: 137

Internet Archive Statistics

All but one of the books in the KU Pilot Collection are 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 majority of 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. KU uploaded the remaining few books to the Internet Archive recently.

The Internet Archive’s website does not indicate a starting date to their reporting period nor have all of the books in the Collection been uploaded yet. However, here are the statistics that we were able to obtain (status: 8 April 2015). These statistics are available for anyone to access on their own website.

Total downloads (up to 08/04/15): 2,708

Average downloads per book: 108