In the royal reading room of Copenhagen’s ‘Black Diamond’ royal library. Image – Getty iStockphoto: Andrew Farnsworth
By Porter Anderson, Editor-in-Chief | @Porter_Anderson
‘Making Research Results More Accessible’
Each year, as you may recall, the Berlin-based Knowledge Unlatched names a list of “Open Access Heroes”—by which the company refers to countries, institutions, publishers, disciplines, and scholarly titles that are “seeing the most usage worldwide.”
This time, the total user interactions for Knowledge Unlatched titles (including downloads and views) now stands at 26 million over the 2023 figure of 21.3 million—a substantial increase of 20 percent, but less than the 30-percent jump represented in last year’s report.
The company says that more than 4,000 books have been published open-access to date, owing to Knowledge Unlatched’s initiatives, “and this number,” the company’s media messaging this week says, “will reach 5,000 titles by the end of 2024.
Overall, according to the announcement, close to 4.5 million users worldwide interacted with Knowledge Unlatched books last year.
The most popular subject area in that pool of content was business and management studies, as indicated by 600,000 user interactions, followed by “area studies” (nearly 550,000 interactions); politics and international studies (nearly 442,000 interactions); modern languages and linguistics (more than 438,0000 interactions; and social work and social policy (close to 405,000 interactions).
Sven Fund
Sven Fund, who oversees Knowledge Unlatched as a senior director with Wiley—which acquired Knowledge Unlatched in late 2021—says in the 2024 report, “Open-access books are becoming more and more a standard in the social sciences and the humanities.
“Since Knowledge Unlatched’s inception in 2013, title volume and usage have grown every single year. This is a testament to publishers’ and librarians’ commitment to making research results more accessible around the world.”
The 2024 assessment sees the United States remaining again the largest user of open-access books, with what Knowledge Unlatched says is 1.2 million interactions in 2023, followed by:
- Germany: Close to 380,000 interactions
- The United Kingdom: Close to 375,000 interactions
- India: More than 200,000 interactions
- Canada: Close to 143,000 interactions
- Australia: Close to 118,000 interactions
The top five institutions with the most open-access user interactions in 2022 were five UK universities:
- University College London
- University of Edinburgh
- King’s College London
- University of Bristol
- University of Cambridge
Which book had the most open-access interactions in 2023? Transcript’s Myths That Made America, with close to 33,000 interactions. After that:
- Pluto Press’ A People’s History of Modern Europe, with more than 32,000 interactions
- UCL’s Social Theory After the Internet: Media, Technology and Globalization, with 32,000 interactions
- Verlag Barbara Budrich’s International Relations: A Self Study Guide to Theory, with more than 32,000 interactions
- University of Georgia Press’ Medical Bondage: Race, Gender and the Origins of American Gynecology, with close to 27,000 interactions
Below is Knowledge Unlatched’s annual infographic, updated for the 2024 data.
To get its figures, Knowledge Unlatched says it accesses usage-assessment results based on the data collected from several hosting platforms including the Open Research Library; OPAEN; JSTOR; and Project MUSE.
Image: Knowledge Unlatched
More from Publishing Perspectives on academic and scholarly publishing is here, more from us on Knowledge Unlatched is here, and more from us on open access is here.