Knowledge Unlatched (KU) has announced KU Select 2016, its third collection of specialist scholarly books in the Humanities and Social Sciences. KU hopes to make this collection available on an Open Access basis.
As KU moves out of its Pilot phase, it has expanded its offering to 343 titles: 147 front list (to be published between Nov 2016-April 2017) and 196 backlist (published between 2005-2015) books.
There are 14 packages available in the Humanities and Social Sciences: Anthropology, Archaeology, Classics, Economics & Management, History, Information Science, Languages & Linguistics, Literature, Media & Communications, Music, Philosophy, Political Science, Sociology, Theology & Religion.The collection was curated from a list of 681 titles chosen by the KU Title Selection Committee consisting of 40 acquisitions and collections librarians in 12 countries.
54 well-respected scholarly publishers are participating from 5 continents including university presses, commercial publishers and Open Access publishers.
KU is calling on libraries from around the world to share the costs of making these monographs Open Access. While the pledging period will run from September 1, 2016 to January 31, 2017, libraries may already register a non-binding account at: http://app.knowledgeunlatched.org/register
Unlatched books are available on Creative Commons licences as fully downloadable PDFs, with hosting and preservation by OAPEN and HathiTrust as well as being preserved by CLOCKSS and Portico.
KU will be offering a more flexible approach for librarians by introducing a 'pick and choose option' for selecting titles. KU will also for the first time be offering libraries their own institutional usage statistics reports for books unlatched in this collection.
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