Berlin, January 30, 2020: Knowledge Unlatched (KU), the central platform for Open Access (OA) financing models, is pleased to announce the results of the 2019 pledging round, which ended in December 2019 and saw hundreds of libraries worldwide pledge support for OA models and initiatives offered by KU and its partners.

In 2019, KU continued to expand its KU Select offerings in the Hu-manities and Social Sciences (HSS) as well as in Science, Technolo-gy, Engineering, and Mathematics (STEM). It also introduced new partnerships and business models with some of the world’s most renowned academic publishers. As a result, KU will be able to un-latch 274 books from its KU Select 2019 HSS collection, 38 books from its KU Select STEM collection, and about 98 books from its various partner offerings, including, among others, Routledge Afri-can Studies 2020-2022, Routledge Gender Studies 2020-2022, HAU Books 2019-2021, IntechOpen Engineering 2020-2022, IntechOpen Physics 2020-2022, KU Romance Studies 2019-2021, Luminos, as well as German language-only packages transcript OPEN Library Politikwissenschaft, wbv Open Library 2020 and Peter Lang IT-Recht.

Apart from unlatching scholarly books, KU will also unlatch 13 journals, resulting from the successful Berghahn Open Anthro Sub-scribe-to-Open pilot, as well as several OA scholarly videos, owing to its partnership with Latest Thinking.

KU will make the title lists for each collection as well as unlatching status transparent and update this information regularly so that li-brarians have a clear understanding of which titles are unlatched or will be unlatched in the future. The unlatching of KU Select 2019, both HSS and STEM collections, will start soon and, owing to KU’s partnership with OCLC, the first set of MARC records will also be made available via the KU website.

“As we continue to grow and test new waters with Open Access, we remain grateful to the library community for their loyalty and will-ingness to explore new possibilities with us,” says Dr. Sven Fund, Managing Director of KU. “We are also pleased to see new libraries pledge their support for the first time and look forward to building these new relationships as well as nurturing existing ones with the academic community.”

In addition to promoting its current and new partner programs in 2020, KU also has plans to revise the KU Select books model based on feedback from partner libraries and will share the new information at the start of May. Further, KU plans to make its financial results for 2019 public in the spring of 2020.

About Knowledge Unlatched (KU): Knowledge Unlatched offers free access to scholarly content for every reader across the world. Its crowdfunding Open Access mod-els provide libraries worldwide with a central place to support the publishing of Open Access content from leading publishers in a wide range of HSS and STEM disciplines.

Contact:
Philipp Hess
philipp@knowledgeunlatched.org