Knowledge Unlatched (KU) has announced that its Pilot Collection of 28 new books from 13 recognised scholarly publishers will become Open Access. The KU Pilot Collection is the first step in creating a sustainable route to Open Access for Humanities and Social Sciences (HSS) books. Support from a minimum of 200 libraries willing to participate in the KU Pilot was required in order to achieve this goal. This target was exceeded by almost half, with close to 300 libraries from 24 countries joining KU in support of its shared cost approach to Open Access for specialist scholarly books.
Knowledge Unlatched is a global initiative, involving 137 participating libraries from North America, 77 from the UK, 27 from Australia and New Zealand and 55 from the rest of the world all working together to make the Pilot Collection Open Access.
Everyone, anywhere in the world, will soon be able to access the KU Pilot Collection books for free on the OAPEN, HathiTrust and the British Library websites.
Titles in the Pilot Collection will be discoverable in the Directory of Open Access Books and WorldCat. All of the titles will be preserved via the British Library, CLOCKSS, HathiTrust, and Portico.
Libraries can register their interest in receiving information for the next rounds of Knowledge Unlatched at http://collections.knowledgeunlatched.org/pre-register/. Publishers wishing to know more about offering books to libraries via Knowledge Unlatched should contact info@knowledgeunlatched.org.
