From: Richard Poynder <[log in to unmask]>
Date: Mon, 26 Nov 2018 18:21:33 +0000

In 2012 serial entrepreneur Frances Pinter founded a new company
called Knowledge Unlatched. The goal, she explained in 2013, was to
“change the way we fund the publishing of quality content” for
book-length publications, and in a way that would allow them to be
made open access.

With that end in mind, Pinter launched a pilot project in which
research libraries were invited to pool money to fund the “fixed
costs” of publishing monographs. By doing so, Pinter reasoned, PDF and
HTML versions of these “unlatched” books could be made freely
available on the Web, but print and other premium versions would
continue to be sold in the traditional manner. And those libraries
that contributed to the pool would earn the right to buy the premium
versions at a discounted price.

In a spirit of civic-mindedness Pinter created Knowledge Unlatched as
a UK non-profit Community Interest Company (CIC) and initial funding
for KU came from (amongst others) the British Library Trust, Open
Society Foundations, HEFCE, as well as a number of Australian
libraries.

When that funding ended, however, as a non-profit CIC, KU struggled to
raise further funds or capital. And with few assets to offer as
collateral, commercial loans were equally hard to come by.
Consequently, it was not immediately clear how KU could become
financially sustainable, or even whether it could. Faced with this
truth, says Pinter, she was minded to call it day.

She nevertheless proceeded to a second pilot round.

In 2016, however, Pinter sold the bulk of KU’s assets, and KU was
transformed from a UK non-profit CIC to a for-profit GmbH based in
Berlin.

This has caused some concern within the research community.

An interview with Pinter can be read here:

https://poynder.blogspot.com/2018/11/the-oa-interviews-frances-pinter.html

-- 
Richard Poynder