Sven Fund's 'Bridge' to Open Access: Knowledge Unlatched

"In the humanities, however, two challenges have hampered open access adoption.

• Most versions of 'gold' open access require researchers or their funding institutions to pay the costs of publication as an 'article processing charge,' or APC.
• And much of the research published in the humanities and social sciences takes the form of books, which naturally have higher processing charges than articles do.

Crowd-Unlatching

Knowledge Unlatched attempts to solve this problem by importing into academic publishing a crowdfunding model not unlike that of Kickstarter.

Working with publishers to create a list of books to be “unlatched”–made freely available–it then assembles a consortium of libraries to pay the costs of publication. If enough libraries commit to funding a title, then the book is published. Each library that pledged receives a print copy, and ebook versions are made available for anyone to read as open access.

The model is finding support.

Since Frances Pinter launched Knowledge Unlatched in September 2012, the organization says it has facilitated the publication of more than 400 books in its first three collections. In February, it announced the success of its latest unlatching, its largest to date: 343 titles from more than 50 publishers.

A fourth collection now is being assembled, with the pledging process expected to start next month. This will be the first collection to include journals."