Knowledge Unlatched Renews Two Successful Open Access Collections

From KU:

Knowledge Unlatched (KU), the international initiative for Open Access (OA), is pleased to announce renewals of two successful Open Access collections from 2017, both of which were launched as pilot projects for three-year funding models: Language Science Press (LSP) Books and KU Select 2017 HSS Journals.

The two collections garnered significant support from libraries around the world, ensuring that 90 books in the field of linguistics (LSP) and 16 Humanities and Social Sciences (HSS) journals were able to be unlatched for the three-year period of 2018–2020 and made freely available to researchers everywhere. Now that the three years are coming to an end, KU has established a viable renewal process to ensure that the publication of LSP books and relevant HSS journals continues for at least another three years.

In order to guarantee a sustainable OA model, KU is renewing both collections into a second round for the years 2021-2023 and inviting libraries worldwide to once again take part in these ground-breaking crowdfunding models. The funds libraries contribute in 2020 will support the unlatching of 90 new books (30 per year) in linguistics, and five HSS journals for at least three more years. The funds will also ensure that there are no article processing charges (APCs) for scholars for either collection.

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The KU Select 2017 HSS Journals collection was the first of KU’s journals models and acted thus as a test case for flipping HSS journals to an Open Access, APC-free model. KU’s research has shown that the five journals to be renewed have grown in size and relevance over the last four years (source: www.journalindicators.com). The SNIP of these five journals has grown on average by 85% over the period investigated. For example, SAGE’s Research Ethics journal shows a SNIP growth of almost 200%, while Brill’s Journal of Language Contact has grown by 33% in the number of articles published.

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Filed under: Funding, Libraries, News, Open Access