Summary

In March 2014 Knowledge Unlatched started to unlatch books in its Pilot Collection, making them available to anyone in the world to read or download for free on a Creative Commons licence. This was the culmination of a behind-the-scenes process of loading the titles onto our partner host platforms: OAPEN and HathiTrust. The books became live on the OAPEN platform first – followed soon after by HathiTrust. The final book in the Pilot Collection was published and made OA on 2 September.

You can view a list of Pilot Collection titles and download them via the KU collections website here.

OAPEN Statistics

The period covered by the data below is from 11 March to 31 December 2014. The data provided pertains to downloads from OAPEN’s website only and is COUNTER compliant. This means that raw download figures have been filtered according to a standard methodology, in order to ensure that the numbers represent real downloads rather than the activity of online bots. OAPEN work with IRUS-UK, a Jisc-funded repository and infrastructure service.

Stats by Collection

Published titles in Collection: 28
Total number of downloads since 11 March: 23,159
Mean average number of downloads per week: 605

Readers in at least 154 countries downloaded books from the collection.

Stats by Title
Mean average number of total downloads by book: 827
(Range per book: 176 – 1,822 each)

Global impact Number of countries downloading KU titles: 154*
*The country of origin for 391 downloads could not be identified.

Mean average number of total downloads by country: 148

Top 20 countries:

COUNTRY	NUMBER OF DOWNLOADS	PERCENTAGE OF TOTAL
1. United States	5,933	25.5%
2. United Kingdom	3,024	13%
3. Germany	1,860	8%
4. China	1,754	7.5%
5. Canada	915	4%
6. Australia	831	3.5%
7. France	783	3%
8. Ukraine	754	3%
9. The Netherlands	701	3%
10. India	430	2%
11. Portugal	424	2%
12. Israel	254	1%
13. Italy	231	1%
14. Poland	230	1%
15. Iran	229	1%
16. Spain	213	1%
17. Indonesia	203	1%
18. Belgium	196	1%
19. Brazil	170	1%
20. Turkey	164	1%
Rest of world	3,860	16.5%

Internet Archive Statistics

All but one of the books in the KU Pilot Collection are available on Creative Commons Non-Commercial licences that allow for sharing with others, as long as it is for non-commercial purposes. This means that users have permission to share PDFs with each other directly via email or messenger. It also means that the books can be made available for download for platforms other than OAPEN and HathiTrust, which KU is partnering with directly. One book is on a CC BY ND licence which allows others to use commercially.

This approach to licencing is already helping to increase the reach of the KU Pilot Collection titles. Unglue.it has posted the majority of the books in the Pilot Collection to the Internet Archive, increasing their visibility and discoverability and helping to promote the KU project and the publishers that are engaging with it.

The Internet Archive’s website does not indicate a starting date to their reporting period nor have all of the books in the Collection been uploaded yet. However, here are the statistics that we were able to obtain (status: 2 February 2015). These statistics are available for anyone to read.

TITLE	Author	NUMBER OF DOWNLOADS
My Voice Is My Weapon	David A. McDonald	254
Understanding the Global Energy Crisis	Eugene D. Coyle, Richard A. Simmons	212
China's iGeneration	Matthew D. Johnson, Keith B. Wagner, Kiki T. Yu, Luke Vulpiani (Eds.)	171
Electronic Iran	Niki Akhavan	145
Beastly Journeys	Tim Youngs	127
Human Rights and Democracy	Todd Landman	115
Verse and Transmutation	Anke Timmermann	84
Making and Unmaking in Early Modern English Drama	Chloe Porter	83
Oaths and Swearing in Ancient Greece	Alan H. Sommerstein, Isabelle Christiane Torrance (Eds.)	73
Constructing Muslims in France	Jennifer Fredette	58
In Search of the Amazon	Seth Garfield	56
Law, Liberty, and the Pursuit of Terrorism	Roger Douglas	55
Partisan Gerrymandering	Erik J. Engstrom	48
The Emergence of Irish Gothic Fiction	Jarlath Killeen	40
Aging Gracefully in the Renaissance	Cynthia Skenazi	33
Fighting for a Living	Erik Jan Zürcher (Ed.)	31
Ever Faithful	David Sartorius	31
Governing Failure	Jacqueline Best	28
Biological Relatives	Sarah Franklin	28
Passionate Amateurs	Nicholas Ridout	27
Composing the Party Line	David G. Tompkins	24
Networks and Institutions in Europe's Emerging Markets	Roger Schoenman	16
Thinking and Killing	Alon Segev	16
The World Jewish Congress During the Holocaust	Zohar Segev	15
On Global Citizenship	James Tully	13

TOTAL DOWNLOADS (up to 02/02/15): 1783
AVERAGE DOWNLOADS PER BOOK: 71

 

HathiTrust Statistics

We hope to present statistics for HathiTrust’s digital library soon.