Stop, Look, Listen — Eight Lessons Learned From Eight Years of Open Access Column Editor: Dr. Sven Fund (Managing Director, fullstopp GmbH, Society for Digitality, Wartburgstraße 25A, 10825 Berlin; Phone: +49 (0) 172 511 4899) <sven.fund@fullstopp.com> www.fullstopp.com Abstract: Knowledge Unlatched (KU) was the first initiative to make monographs available Open Access in the Humanities and Social Sciences and has been offering annual pledging rounds since the pilot in 2013. The KU model has grown considerably in the meantime and has expanded to include journals and other categories. This article considers some key takeaways from the last eight years from an insider perspective, which should be of interest to publishers, libraries and research funding agencies, but also to comparable initiatives aiming to further develop their own approaches. Keywords: Open Access; monographs; Knowledge Unlatched; scientific publishing; scholarly publishing; Humanities and Social Sciences.
Background Free access to scientific information in the form of Open Access (OA) has been developing rapidly since the beginning of the 2000s. Especially in the early years, the natural sciences received the most attention, while other academic disciplines played a negligible role in the rapid development of OA. Frances Pinter, then a publisher and later Managing Director of Manchester University Press, felt that the lack of Open Access publishing in the Humanities and Social Sciences (HSS) was a central weakness of the model and one which needed to be addressed. As a result, she devised an approach in 2012 to make HSS content available Open Access, and that was unique at that time. In contrast to the APC model dominating scientific journals, in which individual articles are “bought free” by the authors or their research funding agencies/institutions, Pinter introduced a model based around institutional funding. At the core of what she later called Knowledge Unlatched (KU) was a collaboration by libraries all over the world who work together to finance making academic books freely available to all users, regardless of their location. A pilot was launched in 2013 as a “proof of concept” exercise to gauge the willingness of libraries and publishers to support such a collective approach. Several well-established HSS publishers participated, and thanks to the collaboration of libraries worldwide, 28 new HSS books were made available OA at that time. Since then, a total of six pledging rounds have been realised and alongside the purely quantitative expansion, the model has also undergone considerable qualitative development.
Objective In order to achieve KU’s entrepreneurial goal of making as much HSS content as possible available OA, various growth options were evaluated from 2015 onwards — once the model had been established. A central question was the (justified) concern that new models in the library market would be rapidly adopted by a small group of enthusiasts but that the broader acceptance Against the Grain / June 2020
necessary for the successful establishment of such a model might not be present among all stakeholders, particularly in the early phase of KU, when funding within libraries was often taken from special or leftover budgets. In cooperation with libraries and publishers, two approaches have been tested: alongside quantitative growth (i.e., more titles in the respective pledging rounds), KU created a virtual marketplace in order to offer more variety in collections and models. The rationale for this was based on the observation that a strong increase in the number of titles in the core model “KU Select” would almost inevitably lead to a greater segregation among participating libraries. It was clear that the funds made available for OA monographs would not be enough to even begin to finance the range of titles that publishers could offer. At the same time, it was assumed that the larger academic institutions would probably be those most willing and economically able to support several simultaneous offers. It also became apparent early on that packages with little differentiation (i.e., numerous publishers contributing titles from a wide range of disciplines to an overall package) would be of limited relevance. This followed the insight that libraries would not completely change their decision-making and acquisition behavior in a short time, even if this were now to take the form of a funding commitment for OA content. Parallel discussions with publishers revealed that they often had an interest in “opening” certain disciplines more than others. This was primarily due to publishing strategies and pressure from editorial boards and authors. Thanks to the cooperation with Language Science Press (LSP) in 2017, KU was able to test, at an early stage, an entire publishing program that could be offered OA. This case study with LSP, KU’s first publishing partner, proved to be a pioneer that would lead to various other models. As of 2019, 15 different partner models have been introduced by KU and libraries worldwide, based on a variety of approaches.
Marketplace as a Core Strategy The concept of a marketplace for OA models also includes other components, however. There was an early strategic goal to be able to finance HSS journals via KU similar to the way in which the Open Library of Humanities works. It was clear, though, that such a model would require a significant departure from the APC model prevalent in the STEM field, which had developed under very different funding conditions. In addition, early discussions with providers of OA infrastructures showed that these also had funding requirements which could additionally be built into the marketplace idea where appropriate. continued on page 62
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