Knowledge Unlatched (KU), a global initiative for Open Access (OA), has unveiled the OA Heroes 2024, spotlighting the countries, institutions, publishers, disciplines, and scholarly titles that garnered the highest usage worldwide in the previous year. Accompanying this celebration is a significant milestone: user interactions for KU titles, encompassing downloads and views, have surged to 26 million—a remarkable increase of 20% since last year's OA Heroes announcement.
With over 4,000 books already published OA through KU's initiatives, this figure is poised to surpass 5,000 titles by the end of 2024. In total, nearly 4.5 million users worldwide engaged with KU books last year. Business and Management Studies emerged as the most popular subject, drawing nearly 600,000 user interactions, followed closely by Area Studies, Politics and International Studies, Modern Languages and Linguistics, and Social Work and Social Policy, each garnering hundreds of thousands of interactions.
The utilization of KU books transcends borders, with the United States leading the pack with nearly 1.2 million interactions, closely followed by Germany, the United Kingdom, India, Canada, and Australia. Among institutions, five UK universities—University College London, the University of Edinburgh, King’s College London, the University of Bristol, and the University of Cambridge—dominated the top five positions in terms of user interactions.
In 2023, the book that attracted the most interactions was transcript’s "Myths that Made America," followed by titles from Pluto Press, UCL, Verlag Barbara Budrich, and the University of Georgia Press.
The assessment of OA usage is based on data collected from various hosting platforms, including the Open Research Library, OAPEN, JSTOR, and Project MUSE. An infographic presenting the usage data is available for download from the Open Research Community website.
Click here to read the original press release.
