Knowledge Unlatched picks up open access award

Share this on social media:

Knowledge Unlatched 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 chose Knowledge Unlatched 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 for specialist scholarly books'. It provides an online platform where the publisher offers a forthcoming book for OA 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. 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.