From: Ann Shumelda Okerson <[log in to unmask]>
Date: Tue, 4 Jun 2019 21:32:57 -0400

Recommended:  June 4th's Scholarly Kitchen posting by Joe Esposito:

Internal Contradictions with Open Access Books

"Knowledge Unlatched (KU) is back in the news. Founded as a
not-for-profit open access (OA) book publisher by Dr. Frances Pinter,
the organization has gone through a couple iterations until
re-emerging as a for-profit company headed by Dr. Sven Fund. (Despite
its for-profit status, KU continues to use its old URL, with a .org
domain.) KU is now hard at work on developing its program, including
its business model. A major piece of this, recently announced in an
interview by Fund, is the Open Research Library (ORL), which aims to
be a comprehensive collection of all OA books, of which there are now
(according to KU) about 15,000-20,000, with approximately 4,000 more
being added every year. KU can aggregate all these books, which have
many publishers, because of the terms of their Creative Commons (CC)
licenses, which encourage reuse and sharing. And that is what has set
off a seismic disturbance."

Long story short, Esposito explains that KU's ORL is drawing fire
because it's aggregating a growing number of Open Access books, a
perfectly legal act, but according to some this violates the "spirit
of open access."  I believe that librarians were consulted in the
development of this platform.

https://scholarlykitchen.sspnet.org/2019/06/04/internal-contradictions-with-open-access-books/