Berlin, March 4^th, 2021: Oable, the Open Access Management workflow solution (www.oable.org) from Knowledge Unlatched (KU), has gone live. 5 leading libraries from institutions in the United States, Austria and Germany are now using Oable to manage their Open Access (OA) transactions. Iowa State University, Los Alamos National Lab, Z. Smith Reynolds Library of Wake Forest University, the Institute of Science and Technology (IST) Austria and Forschungszentrum Jülich have decided after intensive testing to enhance and streamline their workflows with Oable.

“Open Access has become one of the predominant publication models in scholarly publishing, and with its growing volume, it is now also getting awfully complex, labor intensive and increasingly intransparent for libraries”, says Dr. Olaf Ernst, Chief Solutions Officer at KU. “We have developed Oable to support research institutions to tackle this challenge and make Open Access management much easier for them.”

“We have tested Oable quite intensively as one of the first Development Partners. And we are convinced now, that this is a very good solution to help manage our Open Access activities across different business models and publishers. In a world where Open Access will be the publishing model of the future, it is the central role as a library to manage this process efficiently and therefore you need to invest in an infrastructure to help you doing so”, says Dr. Bernhard Mittermaier, Head of the Central Library at the Forschungszentrum Jülich in Germany.

Curtis Brundy, Associate University Librarian for Scholarly Communications and Collections at Iowa State University says: “We supported the concept and the development of Oable from day one, as we believe that delivering an infrastructure to more efficiently manage Open Access activities on campus is well needed to further support the growth and wider acceptance of Open Access Publishing. A goal which is quite important to us at Iowa State.”

Curtis Brundy will also chair the newly formed Oable Customer Council (OCC). Every customer institution is asked to nominate a delegate to this group. The goal of this Council is to best represent and exchange institutions ideas, experiences, knowledge and on-going feedback and advice on improving the infrastructure and processes around Open Access Management activities.

Oable enables libraries to manage their patrons’ OA publications across publishers, different business models and agreement types as well as different media types. It is designed fully interoperable with other systems and highly integrated with several metadata partners, including ExLibris’ Esploro and Alma, Researcher App, OpenAPC/OpenBPC and the Open Journal System (OJS) to allow for a seamless end-to-end solution of Open Access Management for libraries and institutions.

About Knowledge Unlatched (KU)

Knowledge Unlatched is committed to open access to academic content for readers and researchers around the world. Its online platform is the central point of contact for libraries worldwide to support open access models, book and journal collections of leading publishing houses and various OA initiatives.

Contact

Philipp Hess, Head of Publisher Relations

philipp@knowledgeunlatched.org