Spotlight on Knowledge Unlatched - shortlisted for the 2016 ALPSP Awards for Innovation in Publishing

The shortlist for the 2016 ALPSP Awards for Innovation in Publishing, sponsored by MPS Limited, has been announced. In a series of posts leading up to the Awards ceremony at the conference in September, we will focus on each project. Don't forget the shortlist will present in  lightning sessions at the ALPSP Conference. Haven't got your ticket yet? Book here.

First up is Dr Frances Pinter, Founder of Knowledge Unlatched.

Tell us a bit about your company.

Knowledge Unlatched (KU) grew out of a conundrum. How could the decreasing print runs and increase of prices of monographs be good for scholarly communications? The digital sales were simply replacing the print sales to an ever decreasing number of institutions and did little to expand readership. So, what was to be done? We found a way to effectively ‘crowd-source’ the funding of the fixed costs of producing a book (getting to first digital copy costs) from a global network of libraries in exchange for putting the books online free to everyone in the world - Open Access on a Creative Commons license. Publishers continue to sell the books in other formats.

What is the project you submitted for the Awards?

There was no single project submitted for the awards. We focused on the fact that we are now scaling – able to offer hundreds of books per annum rather than just tens of books. We’ve also set up a backlist programme to complement the frontlist offers. Another piece of big news was the introduction of KU Research, a new arm that we established to conduct research into usage and impact of OA books. KU Research is a good place to brainstorm through some of the variations on the basic KU model before we introduce them into the market. We’ve set our own research agenda, already won a competitive award from the EU, are carrying out commissioned research for others and collaborate with other initiatives around the world.

Tell us more about how it works and the team behind it.

The core business of KU is to ‘unlatch’ books and soon journals, i.e. make it possible for high quality, peer reviewed, scholarly works to reach everyone with an interest in that particular work. The main model can best be shown by the diagram below. We ask librarians to guide us all the way; they are in control as the funding comes primarily from their budgets.

The team is global. Three continental nationalities are represented out of our Berlin office where operations, sales and marketing occur and two Brits in the UK (though I am originally American). KU Research is run out of Perth, Australia where we also have a Turkish researcher. We now have a small base with a research fellow inside the University of Michigan Library. Representation on a number of boards and committees is also global.

Why do you think it demonstrates publishing innovation?

Publishers have always relied on selling one unit at a time. Whether it is a book or a journal subscription to a library or an individual, or now an APC for an article based service. The concept of crowd-sourcing for a product is new – with the KU model having potentially a profound impact on the cash flow for publishers. KU changes where payments are made in the value chain and does so by having created a unique balance of interests between publishers and librarians. Publishers get money in earlier while the cost of the product to participating libraries is less than an equivalent closed publication.

What are your plans for the future?

In 2018 we will be presenting our first suite of journals for unlatching. The model has to be tweaked slightly in order to ensure sustainability, but it is not dissimilar to the books model. We are also working on projects that will have multiple sources of funding. In 2018 we will launch a book series that will have funding support from three sources - the learned society that originated the project, specialist research institutes that are active in that field and a wider group of libraries. KU’s job will be to coordinate this.

We’ll also be focusing on expanding the work of KU Research.


Dr Frances Pinter is the Founder and Ambassador for Knowledge Unlatched.  She is a serial entrepreneur who has been at the forefront of innovation in the publishing industry for nearly forty years. She is passionate about books, and about the potential of new technology to increase access to knowledge.

The winner of the ALPSP Awards for Innovation in Publishing, sponsored by MPS Limited, will be announced at the ALPSP Conference, Park Inn Heathrow London. Book you ticket now.

The goals of expanding and improved learning

Frances Pinter on knowledge infrastructures

Changes in the knowledge infrastructures taking place in the academic ecosystem itself will have a profound effect on how learning objects for personalised learning develop in the future. How are publishers, large and small, coming to grips with this.

Frances Pinter, from Manchester University Press and Knowledge Unlatched, provided a concluding overview of aspects of the changing environment and what it means for publishing at the Personalised Learning and Publishing Partnerships seminar.

Knowledge infrastructures are an ecology of people, places and spaces in a discipline. The first iteration was in silos: humanities, social sciences and STEM operating in isolation. The second knowledge infrastructure phase is a Venn diagram of overlapping disciplines.

What are the changing features of these knowledge infrastructures? The borders of tacit knowledge and common ground are shifting. We used to use a lot of face to face contact, but now, that has changed. The complexities of sharing data across disciplines and domains are challenging, but increasingly interesting. There are new norms of what 'knowledge' is. The speed of change of is speeding up.

Selecting and analysing data has changed. In the humanities especially. Think about archaeology. You used to have go and dig to experience it. Now it is catalogued and experienced digitally. We're having to develop different methodologies to deal with the vast datasets that social media provides.

The control of dissemination is changing. Libraries have a much more central yet threatened role in helping with this. What about perpetual preservation, data protection, etc. There are still plenty of issues we haven't come to term with.

How can we reflect on all of this to enable personalised learning? What are the tools that passive recipients we have talked about will engage with and how can we get them to co-create? It's about a change in scholars and scholarship.

Pinter's colleague attended a recent conference in the US. They reported there's a lot of anxiety about careers, but actually a lot of recruitment in the field of digital scholarship. There's also the rise of the 'Alt-Ac' those who just want to research and aren't interested in tenure. Collaboration and interdisciplinarity are encouraged.

What do academics think is needed? A workshop at the Sloan Foundation found that they want to create and nourish mechanisms for large-scale, longer-term research with interdisciplinary collaborations across disciplines. They also want to develop analysis techniques.

What can publishers do? Be clear about the value of your brand. Co-create new forms, collaborate and take models from elsewhere for inspiration. Pinter cites the example of the Natural History Museum. they needed extra space for all their exhibits. their solution? Move the famous 'Dippy' dinosaur in the main hall and take him on tour, hang a whale from the ceiling for added interest and add in the additional exhibits below.

Publishers need to experiment with new business models and bring people with different skills into publishing (a work in progress). They also need to improve discoverability and interoperability as well as foster open access for books. Publishers need to sharpen how they see the future. Open access may be part of the solution.

The new business models that are emerging out of the push for open access do hold promise, particularly for books. Pinter's recommended reading is the Crossick Report. You can't hinder the development of one part of academia simply because academics prefer to work with long form content. The writing of the monograph has an important role to play in the development of knowledge.

Pinter's conclusions from the seminar are:

• Although the Ebook Observatory report showed no impact on sales, does that still hold true today?
• Technical changes are there, but the business models aren't
• The idea of dropping prices to gain market share doesn't take into account the cost of development
• The Jisc e-textbook projects are fascinating, but not yet costed. They are about seeing if it can work, not if it has a sustainable model (yet, we're in transition...)
• Many of the big projects large publishers are developing are likely to be funded from the profits of the existing products so they are unlikely to disband the old model when the new ones are still so experimental
• Digital is making some very fundamental changes to how students learn.

Making open pay

OECD's Catherine Candea

The final session at the ALPSP International Conference was chaired by Catherine Candea from OECD. The panel reflected on the constant pressures on publishers to make content free and asked how can publishers survive and even thrive?

Frances Pinter, interim CEO of Manchester University Press and Founder of Knowledge Unlatched considered sustainable pathways for open access scholarly books. Getting to open access is going to be harder. Income to publishers for the kind of books we are talking about is going to be a mixture.

We don't know yet, where in the continuum we should be looking for up-front funding ('someone pays' model). We need to know as we move forward what the trade-offs will be to find funding for the costs and satisfying expectations of users who access content, and to pay for the added value that publishers can deliver and want to be recompensed for.

In the social sciences and humanities lots of people still want to read printed books. What will people want? We really don't know yet as it is too early in the process to know what does and doesn't work.

'Digital is riding railroads through disciplines in different ways.'

Third party permissions present major challenges which need to be looked at. Books in long form are an important part of research output in the humanities. Should that remain closed just because it doesn't work for books? If it does, it will shoot the discipline in the foot. If the content remains closed, how are you going to measure impact?

There are a number of open monograph models including the open access edition and sales from print and/or ebooks (NAP, Bloomsbury Academic), institutional support for press (World Bank, Amherst) and library press collaboration (Mpublishing/Michigan).

Pinter's own Knowledge Unlatched is about to launch in pilot form. It is not-for-profit and aims to help publishers recover origination costs for monographs while helping lbiraries from around the world share the costs of making books open access. They use CC BY-NC licence and include front list titles. Their goals are to make open access for the humanities and social sciences sustainable so these disciplines don't get left behind.

Libraries can choose to jointly make a title fee payment to publishers by pledging to unlatch a collection via Knowledge Unlatched. In return, publishers make a flag PDF version of unlatched titles available on an open access licence. Hosting and preservation is done via HathiTrust and OAPEN.

There are 14 publishers in the forthcoming pilot with approximately 100 titles in 4 subject areas. In order to unlatch a 30-title collection, 200 libraries will each pay a maximum of $1800 each. Knowledge Unlatched will take 5% to cover costs. Who benefits? Pinter believes readers, libraries, authors, independent researchers and publishers, amongst others.

Pierre Mounier

Pierre Mounier, Associate Director of the Center for Open Electronic Publishing (Cléo), reflected on how policy has changed recently from activism to policy, from green to gold.

There is a 'gold' rush with a growing market for gold publishing. But every gold rush has its drawbacks, often leaving gold rush ghost towns. Is it a sustainable model in the long term? Publishing in this model relies on only one source of funding.

Mounier counselled that we shouldn't throw the baby out with the bathwater: the bathwater is the old clunky access to information that we want to throw away, the baby is the reader themselves and their needs. Publishers need feedback from readers.

The traditional model is a cycle of income-to-publication-to-usage-to-sales-to-income. With the gold model it is replaced by funding-to-publication-to-usage.

Another alternative is to consider the freemium model. They use HTML and produce PDF, ePub for restricted access and an Amazon version for Kindle. It is a combination of free open access and premium services and licensing. They develop premium services for libraries and their patrons which is then licensed to libraries. There is premium access to books and articles with a dashboard, data supplies and services, information, support and training, branding and customisation. But this is not a static offering: they will evolve and add to the service, with more to come in 2014 and 2015.

Open Edition has 100 journals, 800+ books (16,000 anticipated in 2020) and 60+ subscribing libraries.

'Bust out your Excel spread sheet. It's all about finding things in the margins.' 

- Drew Houston, founder of Dropbox

The keyword for Mounier is diversification for sustainable business models. Consider funding (gold), crowd-funding, in-kind institutional support, premium services income and print (on demand) sales.

Niels Stern, Publisher for the Nordic Council of Ministers, closed the session by outlining the five step process they went through to digitise and broaden access to content. These deceptively simple steps include:

1. What is our winning aspiration (visibility and impact)
2. Where will we play? (researchers politicians, government officials)
3. How will we win? (digital distribution)
4. What capabilities must we have? (formats, channels, production tools)
5. What management systems are required (outsourcing partnerships)

Digital distribution was introduced as an open access project, streamlining and modernising the organisation. They are building a repository and policy which has created value for them, and they did this through listening to their target groups.

Keep an open mind. Openness is a very necessary thing when you feel you have a problem. Confront problems in an open way otherwise you won't solve the problem. His suggestions for making the transition included: 

• Stop copying your previous behaviour
• Revisit your arenas
• Zoom in on your target audiences
• Listen
• Identify new needs
• Finally, act and make new solutions!

Best practice is not always the best solution. Open did pay for them, and it can pay in most cases. It's about finding the right balance.