Knowledge Unlatched Presents Open Access Heroes 2024

• May 6, 2024

Knowledge Unlatched (KU), the global initiative for Open Access (OA), has unveiled its OA Heroes 2024, spotlighting the nations, institutions, publishers, disciplines, and scholarly works that garnered the most engagement worldwide in the preceding year. Impressively, user interactions with KU titles, encompassing downloads and views, have surged to 26 million, marking a notable 20% uptick since the last OA Heroes announcement.

With KU’s initiatives facilitating the publication of well over 4,000 OA books to date, this figure is poised to reach 5,000 titles by the close of 2024. Notably, nearly 4.5 million users worldwide engaged with KU books last year, with Business and Management Studies emerging as the top subject, attracting close to 600,000 user interactions, followed by Area Studies, Politics and International Studies, Modern Languages and Linguistics, and Social Work and Social Policy, each garnering substantial engagement.

Dr. Sven Fund, Wiley Senior Director, underscores the growing prominence of OA books in the social sciences and humanities, citing the consistent annual growth in title volume and usage since KU’s inception in 2013. This trend reflects publishers’ and librarians’ steadfast commitment to enhancing the accessibility of research findings globally.

The widespread utilization of KU books transcends geographical boundaries, with the United States leading in OA book usage, followed by Germany, the United Kingdom, India, Canada, and Australia. Notably, the top five institutions with the highest user interactions in 2022 were all UK universities: University College London, the University of Edinburgh, King’s College London, the University of Bristol, and the University of Cambridge.

In terms of individual works, the most interacted-with book in 2023 was “Myths that Made America” by transcript, followed by “A People’s History of Modern Europe” from Pluto Press, “Social Theory After the Internet: Media, Technology and Globalization” by UCL, “International Relations: A Self Study Guide to Theory” by Verlag Barbara Budrich, and “Medical Bondage: Race, Gender and the Origins of American Gynecology” by the University of Georgia Press.

As in prior years, the assessment of OA usage is based on data gathered from various hosting platforms such as the Open Research Library, OAPEN, JSTOR, and Project MUSE. An infographic consolidating the usage data is available for download from the Open Research Community website.

Photo via Knowledge Unlatched