The University of Kent has joined Knowledge Unlatched to help make 343 more books freely available worldwide.

Open Access books

Open Access books are online publications freely available to anyone with internet access. You don’t need to be a member of a university or library to use them and you don’t have to pay to use or download them. The main benefit is wider readership and increased use.

But the publication costs need to be paid for somehow.

Knowledge Unlatched

One answer is Knowledge Unlatched, a not-for-profit company established in 2012 with the aim of creating a sustainable model for Open Access book publishing.

How Knowledge Unlatched works

Knowledge Unlatched uses a consortium model. Publishers are asked to offer newly published books to libraries on the basis that they are made immediately Open Access upon publication. In return the consortium pays a fee for each title. Libraries around the world are then invited to join the consortium and share the costs of the title fees. The more libraries in the consortium, the lower the cost for each institution.

Knowledge Unlatched, the University of Kent and the latest collection

The University of Kent was one of [270 libraries from 21 countries]  made available as Open Access via Knowledge Unlatched since 2014.

The publishers
54 publishers took part, including Cambridge University Press and Manchester University Press.

The book titles
The Humanities and Social Sciences titles cover sixteen subject areas.

How to find and read the books

The books can be found in Google and other search engines. You can download them for free as PDFs and EPUBs. They are also available on the OAPEN platform. They will soon be available in Kent’s LibrarySearch too.