The International Federation of Library Associations and Institutions (IFLA) and scholarly publisher Brill have announced that Knowledge Unlatched, from the UK, has been selected as this year's winner of the IFLA/Brill Open Access Award.
The IFLA/Brill Open Access Award was created in 2013 for initiatives in the area of open access monograph publishing. This year the jury unanimously has chosen Knowledge Unlatched (United Kingdom) as the most outstanding and game-changing initiative in the field.
Knowledge Unlatched (KU) was established with the goal of 'creating a sustainable route to
Open Access (OA) for specialist scholarly books.' The basic concept is to create an online platform where the publisher offers a forthcoming book for open access provided the publication costs are met. As soon as enough interested libraries sign up to contribute to these costs, the book is 'unlatched' and becomes publicly accessible.
To test the concept, in 2013 KU selected 28 books from 13 scholarly publishers to take part in the Pilot Collection. To unlatch this collection, KU sought support from a minimum of 200 libraries from around the world. In the end, 297 signed up, which, earlier this year, made the collection publicly accessible.
The jury of the IFLA/Brill award is deeply impressed with the simplicity and elegance of the original concept, with the daring scope of the project, bringing together libraries, publishers and other organisations from around the world, and with the highly successful outcome of the pilot phase that tested the concept.
The award will be presented at the occasion of the IFLA World Library and Information Congress to be held in Lyon (France), August 2014.
