An Interview with Frances Pinter, Founder of Knowledge Unlatched

Here’s a recently published interview between Ann-Marie Green, Communication Manager at Wiley and Frances Pinter, Founder of the award winning Knowledge Unlatched (KU), project to “open” front-list books in the humanities and social sciences using a crowdfunding-like approach.
The pilot collection of books (28 full text books/13 publishers, humanities and social science titles) from KU will become open access after more than 300 libraries pledged support.
Now, to the new Wiley Interview with Frances Pinter. It consists of eight questions and answers.
Here’s one of them.

Q. Ann-Marie Green (Wiley): How would you like to see Knowledge Unlatched grow and evolve in future?
A. Frances Pinter (Knowledge Unlatched):
KU was set up to demonstrate three things. They are:
1. That publishers are willing to make high quality, front-list books available on an OA license in return for the payment of a single, fixed title fee by a global community of libraries;
2. Libraries from around the world could work together to share this fee; and
3. Doing so would provide a financially-viable alternative to traditional content acquisition models for both publishers and libraries.
This was successfully accomplished through the pilot project. How it develops and grows is in the hands of the publishing and library communities.
There are practical questions around how one scales up a model like KU. We decided during the pilot that it didn’t make sense to set up a totally separate infrastructure ourselves, so we are talking to intermediaries who already have the contacts amongs both publishers to source the books and libraries to present them for unlatching.

Read the Complete Interview
See Also: KU Pilot Summary Report here.”>KU Pilot Project Summary (May 2014)

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