NEWS

Full details of KU Select 2016 Are Announced

KU Select 2016 is Knowledge Unlatched’s (KU) third collection of specialist scholarly books in the Humanities and Social Sciences which it hopes to make available on an Open Access basis.

As KU moves out of its Pilot phase, it has expanded its offering to 343 titles: 147 front list (to be published between Nov 2016-April 2017) and 196 backlist (published between 2005-2015) books.

There are 14 packages available in the Humanities and Social Sciences: Anthropology, Archaeology, Classics, Economics & Management, History, Information Science, Languages & Linguistics, Literature, Media & Communications, Music, Philosophy, Political Science, Sociology, Theology & Religion.

The collection was curated from a list of 681 titles chosen by the KU Title Selection Committee consisting of 40 acquisitions and collections librarians in 12 countries.

54 well-respected scholarly publishers are participating from 5 continents including university presses, commercial publishers and Open Access publishers.

KU is asking for the support of libraries from around the world to share the costs of making these monographs Open Access. The pledging period will run from 1 September 2016 to 31 January 2017 but libraries may already register a non-binding account at: http://app.knowledgeunlatched.org/register

Unlatched books are available on Creative Commons licences as fully downloadable PDFs, with hosting and preservation by OAPEN and HathiTrust as well as being preserved by CLOCKSS and Portico.

KU will be offering a more flexible approach for librarians by introducing a ‘pick and choose option’ for selecting titles. KU will also for the first time be offering libraries their own institutional usage statistics reports for books unlatched in this collection.

Libraries can pledge their participation by selecting a minimum of 90% of the titles in KU Select 2016, which equates to $9,653 (€8,775 / £7,020). The maximum cost of supporting all 343 titles is $10,725 (€9,750 / £7,800). This is $55 (€50 / £40) per new book and $13.75 (€12.50 / £10) per backlist book. KU is introducing a pick and choose option to offer libraries more flexibility. Publishers are recognising additional format purchases by offering KU libraries a 35% discount.

Useful documentation about KU Select 2016 http://www.knowledgeunlatched.org/download/