MUP’s CEO, Dr. Frances Pinter is also the founder of Knowledge Unlatched and was recently in Lyon to accept the IFLA/Brill Award for Open Access 2014 at the International Federation of Library Association’s annual congress.

Knowledge Unlatched was chosen as the most outstanding and game-changing initiative in the field in 2014. The Knowledge Unlatched model depends on many libraries from around the world sharing the payment of a single Title Fee to a publisher, in return for a book being made available on a Creative Commons license via OAPEN and HathiTrust. The Title Fee represents the basic cost of publishing a book. Because the Title Fee is a fixed amount, as more libraries participate in Knowledge Unlatched, the per-library cost of ‘unlatching’ each title declines.

The jury of the IFLA/Brill award stated that they were ‘deeply impressed with the simplicity and elegance of the original concept, with the daring scope of the project, bringing together libraries, publishers and other organizations from around the world, and with the highly successful outcome of the pilot phase that tested the concept’. Read the full press release here

MUP was one of the 13 distinguished university presses and academic publishing houses from the UK, Europe and the USA that participated in the pilot with the book, Making and unmaking in early modern English drama by Chloe Porter.