The Story of Knowledge Unlatched

My exposure to the deep inequities in accessing knowledge began in the 1980s, when I visited countries in East and Southeast Asia where only a few institutions could afford expensive Western books and journals. Later, in the nineties, as the publishing director of the Open Society Institute (now Foundations, established by the philanthropist George Soros) I travelled to all thirty countries of the post-communist bloc. There I regularly walked along library corridors with empty shelves on either side of me.

Those experiences would become the seeds of Knowledge Unlatched (KU), a model by which libraries collectively fund open access scholarly books, which recently returned to nonprofit ownership under Annual Reviews (note: Annual Reviews is the publisher of Katina). In this article, I’ll explore how KU went from an idea to an operational entity and how it has evolved.

By the end of the 90s, digitization and the spread of Internet availability suggested ways to redress the inequity of access. Unfortunately, many commercial publishers rushed to replicate the business models and high prices of the print world. Electronic Information for Libraries (EIFL) (which I helped establish in 1999), then Hinari and Agora, reduced prices through collective negotiations. At the same time, the concept of open access (OA) was born and in 2002 embodied in the Budapest Open Access Declaration.

In 2008, as founding publisher of Bloomsbury Academic, I had the opportunity to try an OA approach with books. I argued then that the OA version would help market the print editions and that we might even ultimately sell more in print because the book would become known through its OA life. I worked with Lucy Montgomery (now professor at Curtin University) and her “ice cream” model (Figure 1).

At the Organization for Economic Co-operation and Development (OECD), Toby Green was already experimenting with the Freemium model, which offered the core OECD data for free while charging for additional functionality and content. It was a good model, but I thought it was unlikely to work with monographs in the humanities and social sciences world. The market and sources were just too dispersed (or put another way, the ice cream sundae would require too many different flavors).

While a few monographs appeared online in the early 2000s, by 2010 only the largest publishers had put their toes into the water. Significant growth in eBook aggregators such as ProQuest Ebook Central, EBSCO eBooks, and Project MUSE enabled smaller publishers to enter into the market. So, by 2010 I began to think about creating a business model that could facilitate making monographs open access.

The guiding principle behind what was to become Knowledge Unlatched was simple. Libraries could rechannel their existing funds into an aggregated pool of money to be used to make monographs open. Acquisition costs would be lowered for each library as calculated on a per book basis and compared to closed book prices. Publishers would establish a title fee. If enough libraries contributed to that fee on a per title basis, then the project would become viable. A small management charge would be levied by KU. Now this seems obvious, but it certainly was not then.

In 2010, I was invited by Peter Brantley (now director, online strategy, UC Davis Library) to speak about the Bloomsbury experiment at the Tools of Change conference in New York. It was one of the first conferences to be streamed live and my colleagues at Bloomsbury were watching. I followed the colorful Arianna Huffington (of Huffington Post) and wondered whether anyone would care about what I had to say.

When I finished, I took a seat. A wonderful lady in a cowboy hat came bounding up to me and said, “You’re on to something, keep going.” That was Sue Polanka of No Shelf Required. The next day I presented the idea to a small group of librarians and academics at Columbia University. The library director said it would never work. But as she was leaving, and out of earshot of her boss, the quiet deputy librarian said, “You’re on to something, keep going.” That evening at dinner, Tony Marx, CEO of the New York Public Library, not only said “Keep going,” but also provided resource support for the next phase. Late that year I presented at the Charleston Conference.

For two years I went from conference to conference, taking on criticisms of the model—mainly around the criteria to be applied in the pre-selection process run by librarians, how much time to allow in between stages, and what the pricing model should be—and fine-tuning it. A decision on one part of the model often led to unintended consequences for others.

I had been calling the project the International Library Coalition for Open Access Books, ILCOAB, but as I prepared to turn it into a legal entity, I offered a bottle of champagne to whoever came up with a catchier name. All the suggestions were horrible until my husband came up with “Knowledge Unlatched.” I bought the champagne and drank half of it as we celebrated.

I shed the ungainly acronym ILCOAB, but not the underlying concept of coalitions, collectives, and consortium building, which are only more important today as we need consensus not just to make the case for OA but to actually implement actions.

The early days of KU were tough, sometimes brutal. Librarians said their procurement departments wouldn’t allow them to “buy” something that couldn’t be quantified as an asset on the balance sheet. Publishers said it was too risky. Consultants wrung their hands and shouted “free riders, free riders”—why would anyone pay if they know they can get it for free? Our team of four very part time people (Lucy, me, Leon Loberman on tech, and Christina Emery, now at Springer Nature, holding us all together) persevered.

In 2011, Lynne Brindley, CEO of the British Library, gave the enterprise some street cred when she provided KU with desk space, and the British Library Foundation awarded the project a small grant with which to move forward and cover conference costs. My old employer, the Open Society Foundations, provided a seed grant. Celeste Feather of Lyrasis saw the potential and set up a pivotal workshop at the 2014 ALA meeting in Las Vegas. She even managed to get the International Coalition of Library Consortia (ICOLC) to bend its rule prohibiting publishers from presenting at their annual conference. I had a half hour slot and then was quickly ushered out.

After three years of planning and workshopping, we launched a pilot project in 2013 with 13 publishers and 28 books. Nearly 300 libraries in 24 countries signed up. The second collection, in 2014, consisted of 142 books from 23 contributing publishers. And then we won an award from LIBER. Much had changed since a distinguished UK publisher called me a “copyright terrorist” just a few years earlier.

I still had a day job as CEO of Manchester University Press. For KU to grow it needed investment, people, and time to consult with both publishers and libraries about how the model might scale and to provide variations beyond what was to become KU Select, the flagship diamond model. By 2015, it was clear KU needed a new home.

The search was challenging. For the large aggregators it was a proposition that came too early. One large publisher was interested but they were in the midst of restructuring. A small library supplier also expressed interest but went bust during negotiations.

In late 2016, the entrepreneurial Sven Fund stepped in. I’d conceived of KU as a “shopping mall” where librarians could decide which books they wanted to support. Sven presented KU as a “marketplace” where lots of different approaches to getting to open access for both books and journals could be showcased, tried, and tested.

In 2018, KU introduced KU Open Funding, a means of comparing offers by publisher. This transparency was welcomed by the library community. KU also diversified into special collections, journals, and infrastructure tools—all succeeding when sufficient numbers of libraries subscribed. Sven invested in the tech required to support the enlarged platform and built a community. In 2021, he sold KU to Wiley.

By the end of 2024, KU had, since its inception, “unlatched” over 5,000 books and 50 journals, with over 100 publishers and 670 libraries participating. Over the years, nearly 50 people worked for KU directly and 500 contributed in various capacities.

Wiley ultimately decided that KU would be better off in a not-for-profit environment and sold it to Annual Reviews, whose president, Richard Gallagher, uses a more colorful image to describe what it could be: a “grand bazaar” (Gallagher, 2025). I could only dream of KU becoming such a place when I launched it.

Though, in fact, there was little time to dream. The reality of most breakthroughs is that they start with a small, lopsided idea that needs nurturing, reshaping and reforming before it becomes acceptable and adoptable. The best thing about the KU journey for me was the companionship of colleagues who came with me on the ride.

Looking forward, we need initiatives like Knowledge Unlatched now more than ever. Researchers face new political threats to their freedom to research, to write, and to publish as well as growing financial barriers to publication. To advance knowledge creation and discovery, the best foundational work of our scholars and scientists must be read and contributing to human development. If we believe that ideas change the world, then we need them out there for all the world to see. This is the promise of true open access: to liberate the power of global knowledge for the greater good of humankind.

References

Gallagher, R. (2025, July 7). Advancing collective models to unlatch knowledge. Research Information. https://www.researchinformation.info/analysis-opinion/advancing-collective-models-to-unlatch-knowledge/