Berlin, March 5, 2020. Knowledge Unlatched (KU), the international initiative for Open Access (OA), is pleased to announce that it has grown the impact of OA titles through its collections. In 2019, the number of total interactions (downloads and views) has grown by 50 percent to more than three million and on average 1,900 per title (a total of 1,559 unique titles). In 2018, the average equalled 1,800 per title (1,112 unique titles) and therefore also on a title level the impact is increasing slightly. These titles have been downloaded and viewed across more than 200 countries.

“KU strives to not only increase the number of titles made Open Access, but by reviewing the impact we can assess whether we are reaching readers online,” says Dr. Sven Fund, KU’s Managing Director. “We are happy to see that with a growing corpus of titles we can keep up the relevancy, driven by a very supportive international community.”

The title with the most interactions in 2019 was Ralph Schroeder’s Social Theory of the Internet (UCL Press), followed by William A. Pelz’s A People’s History of Modern Europe (Pluto Press) and Heike Paul’s The Myths That Made America (transcript). The academic institution with the most user interactions in 2019 was Johns Hopkins University, followed closely by Freie Universität Berlin.

The countries that continue to see the highest usage of OA books include the United States (one million interactions), the United Kingdom (220,000 interactions), Germany (150,000 interactions), France (100,000 interactions) and Canada (85,000 interactions).

The results of this year’s OA usage assessment are based on the data collected from several hosting platforms, including OAPEN, JSTOR, and Project MUSE. With the launch of the Open Research Library in early 2020—which will be indexed by libraries worldwide through several discovery services—KU will be able to share even more usage data moving forward.

An infographic that presents all the usage data in one place can be freely downloaded on KU’s web site in portrait and landscape formats.

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, Publisher Relations

philipp@knowledgeunlatched.org