Knowledge Unlatched

Knowledge Unlatched (KU) makes scholarly content freely available to everyone and contributes to the further development of the Open Access (OA) infrastructure. Their unique approach provides libraries and institutions worldwide with a central place to support OA collections and models from leading publishing houses and new OA initiatives. With the support of more than 670 libraries and research institutions worldwide, KU transitions monographs and journals in a wide variety of disciplines from paywalled to Open Access content. Additionally, KU offers various tools and services for stakeholders in the OA community.

In 2022, libraries and organizations can pledge their support for Knowledge Unlatched and its partner initiatives at the KU website.

The KU Brochure provides detailed information about all available pledging opportunities.

KU Select HSS 2023 Books (named "2023" to reflect the year in which most of the books will be unlatched)

• 343 books planned to be unlatched: 151 frontlist and 292 backlist (2012-2021)
• Participation from more than 50 leading scholarly publishers from 5 continents, including university presses, commercial publishers, and OA publishers
• Provisional title lists are available
• Curated by the KU Selection Committee 2022 consisting of over 200 librarians worldwide
• Covering 7 key subject areas in the Humanities and Social Sciences which have seen the highest usage over recent years:
• • Anthropology
  • Communication, Cultural, and Media Studies
  • English Language and Literature
  • History
  • Modern Languages and Linguistics
  • Politics and International Studies
  • Sociology
• Pledge for the full collection or by subject package, including two new KU Focus Collections:
  • KU Focus Collection 2023: Climate Change, a special collection containing 20 frontlist titles from several publishers around one topical, cutting edge theme. Last year, KU introduced the first KU Focus Collection, which was on the topic of climate change and which proved to be a great success. Thanks to the overwhelming support from institutions around the world, KU will be able to make 25 books OA in 2022 for this collection. The pledging price is $2,836.
  • KU Focus Collection 2023: Global Health, a special collection containing 20 titles from several publishers. KU asked librarians for feedback after last year's successful focus collection around climate change, and the majority of participants favored two focus collections: one again on climate change and a new one on global health. The pledging price is $2,836
• Creative Commons licenses - hosted by the Open Research Library, OAPEN, JSTOR and MUSEOpen
• Content discoverable via various systems including OCLC Worldcat, the Internet Archive, EBSCO, ProQuest/Ex Libris
• High Quality MARC Records and quarterly usage reporting by institution available

Why contribute?
Your participation supports an ever-growing number of institutions that are using acquisitions funds to make HSS book titles Open Access. This model benefits both individual libraries and the wider community, by providing access to scholarly books for every reader across the world. There are a number of additional benefits for libraries:

• Enables libraries to contribute to fulfilling OA mandates in certain territories
• Flexible offering – pick and choose from available subject packages as well as the KU Focus Collection 2023: Climate Change and the new KU Focus Collection 2023: Global Health
• Quarterly usage reports to show the real impact of OA publishing
• DRM-free titles
• High-quality MARC records for better discoverability
• Involvement with the creation of future collections by taking part in the KU Selection Committee

Prices for the KU Select 2023 HSS Books
Pledge your participation by selecting:

• Full pledge: The complete KU Select 2023 HSS Books of 343 titles (both frontlist and backlist)
• Front list only: The KU Select 2023 HSS Books frontlist collection of 151 titles
• By subject package: You can also select the subject package(s) most relevant to your users. Within the subject packages it is also possible to pledge for front list only.

Tiered Pricing – KU Select 2023 HSS Books
For institutions in the US and Canada, tiered pricing is available for your regions. See table below for US institutions and visit the pricing on the KU website for Canada. Please note that tiered pricing only applies to the full KU Select 2023 HSS Books collection (or frontlist only) but not to any of the subject packages or to the KU Focus Collection 2023: Climate Change or the new KU Focus Collection 2023: Global Health. Pricing for individual subject collections is available at the KU website.

Other KU Offers and Partnerships:

• Emerald Publishing Responsible Management and the SDGs 2023-2025 This collection features books from the fields of business and management; HR and organization studies; economics; tourism and hospitality; property management and built environment; and other related fields. All titles in the collection will have a distinct focus on responding to and achieving the United Nations' Sustainable Development Goals, with a particular focus on SDGs 8 (Decent Work and Economic Growth); 9 (Industry , Innovation, and Infrastructure); and 12 (Responsible Consumption and Production). Key topics include: Diversity; inclusion and gender and racial equality in the workplace; sustainable supply chains; supporting economic growth in developing countries; ending forced labor, modern slavery, and human trafficking; and more. The pledging price is $2,496 over 3 years.
• Latest Thinking on the Climate Action Latest Thinking envisions to broaden the impact of scholarly works. Their independent OA platform provides video summaries of research findings covering all academic fields. All original videos are based on peer-reviewed academic publications and brought to you by the authors in person via a video player which navigates users through the scholar's flow of ideas. A pledge of $3,403 for this collection will help support the funding of 20 new videos in the highly topical area of climate action.
• KU Inclusion: The Struggle for Democracy Partnering with the University of Michigan Press, this package focuses on the current topic of peace and justice. Ten new titles are due for publication in the course of 2023, and the cost to pledge is $2,950.
• Routledge African Studies 2023-2025 A continuation of the successful partnership with Routledge for a further three years. The collection covers a range of books on all sub-disciplines of African and African diaspora studies as OA, making them freely available and accessible to all.
• Routledge Gender Studies 2023-2025 A continuation of the successful partnership with Routledge for a further three years. The list provides global cutting-edge research on hot topics such as LGBTQ rights, Post-Colonialism and Feminist Pedagogy.
• Berghahn Migration and Development Studies Books 2021-2023 The full list of new frontlist publications on the topic of international migration and movement as well as Studies of Cultural Development.
• HAU Books HAU Books is the book publishing wing of the Society for Ethnographic Theory (SET), a learned society. SET is a non-profit initiative, committed to publishing the most distinguished texts in classics and advanced anthropological theory. The SET has completed a diligent restructuring to further professionalize its society for an OA future.
• Pluto Press Radical Politics 2021-2023 Cutting edge critical work in the social sciences employing Marxist, feminist, decolonial and other radical approaches. The full frontlist book production from Pluto Press for the next three years.

KU STEM Collections:

• EDP Sciences Open Mathematics 2023-2025: A ground-breaking Subscribe-to-Open (S2O) project in Mathematics, this collection includes 6 journals for a 3-year pledging term.
• International Water Association Publishing Frontlist Books 2023-2025: Includes publications in the defined subject area of water and wastewater.
• International Water Association Publishing Open Journals 2023-2025: A Subscribe-to-Open (S2O) of 10 journals.

KU Spotlight Collections:

• University of California Press Luminos Membership: Membership fees are used to directly cover the costs of publishing, with any surplus added to an author waiver fund to support authors.
• Open Commons of Phenomenology: An online research platform bringing OA to scholarly materials and resources in the field of phenomenology.

KU Open Infrastructures:

• Open Research Library (ORL): ORL includes OA content in different media formats on one central platform for user-friendly discovery, offering a seamless experience for navigating tens of thousands of books and other types of scholarly content from a variety of sources. Libraries investing in ORL contribute to the development of a dedicated infrastructure for the global research community, while participating libraries have the opportunity to benefit from a set of exclusive services.
• KU Open Analytics: KU Open Analytics harmonizes different usage reports and combines multiple sources to generate a unique overview of which content is being used at your institution.
• oable: oable is a single solution to seamlessly approve, pay, and manage OA agreements and publications.