Knowledge Unlatched
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Knowledge Unlatched (KU) is an award-winning not-for-profit organisation registered as a community interest company in the United Kingdom. It offers a global library consortium approach to funding open access books.
Knowledge Unlatched was established in September 2012 by publisher and social entrepreneur Frances Pinter. Knowledge Unlatched was the formalisation of the ‘Global Library Consortium’ model for supporting open access books, developed by Pinter as a response to a protracted crisis in monograph publishing and the opportunities presented by digital technology and open access.
Pinter first aired her vision for a Global Library Consortium approach to supporting open access monograph publishing at the Charleston Conference in 2010.
In September 2011 Pinter embarked on a speaking tour of Australia. Her tour included a keynote presentation on academic publishing and the future of the monograph at Queensland University of Technology, arranged by Dr. Lucy Montgomery, who would go on to become Deputy Director of Knowledge Unlatched. While at QUT, Pinter met with DVC for Technology, Library and Information Services, Professor Tom Cochrane. This trip played a key role in securing support for Knowledge Unlatched from three founding Australian libraries: Queensland University of Technology, The University of Melbourne and The University of Western Australia.
In 2012, then Harvard University Librarian Robert Darnton hosted a meeting of leaders of major US libraries and academic presses to discuss the Global Library Consortium concept.
In 2015, KU was fundamental in the announcement that Google Scholar will start to index Open Access books hosted by OAPEN.
In its first two collections (the Pilot and Round 2), Knowledge Unlatched piloted a collective procurement approach to open access books. The model put forward by Frances Pinter in 2011 depends on many libraries from around the world sharing the payment of a single title fee to a publisher, in return for a book being made available on a Creative Commons licence via the open access repository service "Open Access Publishing in European Networks" (OAPEN) and the HathiTrust Digital Library as a fully downloadable PDF.
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