From: JJE Esposito <[log in to unmask]>
Date: Wed, 29 Aug 2018 10:06:33 -0400

It is, of course, a milestone that Knowledge Unlatched (KU) reached over
one million downloads in 2018, but does anyone know what these figures
mean? A download is a crude metric, comparable to the page view in consumer
Web advertising. No one in the advertising industry uses anything so
primitive any more. It is perplexing to me that the scholarly community
would use measures less sophisticated than those used to try to sell us a
Pez dispenser or a trip to Las Vegas.

It is an article of faith in the OA community that the high price of
scholarly materials (invoke Elsevier's 40% margins here) deny access to
researchers and the general public. This must be at least partly true, as
we read all the time about monographs priced at $40 or $90 and even, last
week, a college textbook priced at $1,000. But going from a high price to
no price at all--OA is free to the end-user, after all--is an odd bit of
methodology. When we measure downloads instead of sales, we move from the
demand economy to the supply economy. This is apples and oranges.

The question I have is how many downloads KU or any other OA book service
would have if there were a charge of $1 per download, thus marrying the
demand and supply-side economies. Would the number of downloads drop to
900,000? 500,000? 15? We won't know until we try.

It will be argued that even $1 is too much for some people. This is true.
But where does the assumption that everyone is penniless come from? Surely
there are some people who have downloaded books from KU who have a Netflix
subscription, drive a Honda, and stopped off at Starbucks in the past
month? A price of $1 download would help us find out what needs KU and
other OA book publishers are serving and begin the hard task of measuring
the real value these services provide.

Joe Esposito


On Wed, Aug 29, 2018 at 8:30 AM, LIBLICENSE <[log in to unmask]> wrote:

> From:  [log in to unmask]
> Date: Tue, 28 Aug 2018 19:48:24 -0400
>
> Knowledge Unlatched titles reach over 1 million downloads in 2018
>
> More than 250% increase in use compared to 2017
>
> Berlin, 28.08.2018. Knowledge Unlatched (KU) announces a new record
> for usage of its Open Access (OA) books. Over 950 titles from the
> Humanities and Social Sciences (HSS) have been accessed more than 1
> million times by users worldwide in the past 8 months of this year
> alone. The increase in usage compared to 2017 is significant: On
> aggregate, KU content has seen 570,000 full-text downloads on the
> OAPEN platform and a further 490,000 chapter downloads on the JSTOR
> platform.
>
> "We are pleased that scientists around the world are using the content
> of our approximately 100 publishing partners to such an extent." says
> Tom Mosterd, Discovery & Account Manager at KU. "It is exciting to see
> that libraries are committed to ensuring that OA books are made
> accessible to a global audience, thereby playing a crucial role in
> reaching this key milestone.’’
>
> Financed by libraries worldwide, nearly 1,000 titles have already been
> made available through Knowledge Unlatched, and several hundred titles
> are added every year.
>
> About Knowledge Unlatched: Knowledge Unlatched (KU) offers every
> reader worldwide free access to scientific content. The online
> platform provides libraries worldwide with a central point of contact
> to support Open Access models of leading publishers and new Open
> Access initiatives.
>
> Contact:
>
> Philipp Hess, Publicity & Communications, Knowledge Unlatched
>
> [log in to unmask]
>