Knowledge Unlatched (KU) has recently launched a new pledging round. The year 2023 marks a significant milestone for KU as it celebrates ten years of unlatching Open Access (OA) monographs with the support of libraries worldwide. This year, KU is also introducing significant changes to its flagship collection, KU Select, which has been restructured to align with the UN’s Sustainable Development Goals (SDGs). By focusing on these globally recognized objectives ..read more

Knowledge Unlatched (KU), the international initiative for Open Access (OA), celebrates a significant milestone as it marks ten years of OA publishing in 2023. To commemorate this achievement, KU is thrilled to announce the launch of its tenth round of funding, which has to date supported the publication of over 4,000 scholarly books and 50 journals in a range of humanities, sciences, and social sciences. Knowledge Unlatched is part of ..read more

The EU is ready to agree that immediate open access to papers reporting publicly funded research should become the norm, without authors having to pay fees, and that the bloc should support non-profit scholarly publishing models. In a move that could send shockwaves through commercial scholarly publishing, the positions are due to be adopted by the Council of the EU member state governments later this month. Various draft positions on ..read more

The research libraries of the Big Ten Academic Alliance (BTAA) have entered into a multi-year pilot agreement with JSTOR to support Path to Open, a new cost-effective, sustainable publishing model for supporting frontlist university press monographs and making them open access after three years. More than 30 university presses and hundreds of authors are part of Path to Open. The initial 100 books will be released on JSTOR in the fall ..read more

In a statement published on (and dated) April 17, 2023, the Guild of European Research-Intensive Universities has expressed concerns over the unsustainability of the academic publishing system in Europe. The statement, available on The Guild’s website, reads as follows: The Guild expresses its concerns over the current financial unsustainability of the academic publishing system in Europe. The rise of open-access models requiring article-processing charges (APCs) has worsened the issue, contributing ..read more

It took Alex Polyakov just a couple of hours to break GPT-4. When OpenAI released the latest version of its text-generating chatbot in March, Polyakov sat down in front of his keyboard and started entering prompts designed to bypass OpenAI’s safety systems. Soon, the CEO of security firm Adversa AI had GPT-4 spouting homophobic statements, creating phishing emails, and supporting violence. Polyakov is one of a small number of security researchers, technologists, and ..read more

The American Library Association (ALA) today announced a national day of action to protect libraries and the freedom to read, designating April 24, the Monday of National Library Week, as Right to Read Day. Right to Read Day also marks the first anniversary of the ALA-founded Unite Against Book Bans campaign, a public-facing advocacy initiative to empower readers everywhere to stand together in the fight against censorship. “Right to Read Day ..read more

cOAlition S, as an international consortium of research funding and performing organizations committed to accelerating the transition to open access, has responded to the National Institutes of Health (NIH) request for information regarding their plan to enhance public access to the results of NIH-supported research. The NIH’s Public Access Plan aims to provide a roadmap for how NIH will enhance access to research products, namely scholarly publications and scientific data, and will ..read more

by Hilda Ruokolainen, Gunilla Widén, Eeva-Liisa Eskola Abstract It is important to widen the understanding of misinformation in different contexts. The findings of this qualitative study showed that official information can be misinformation. Official information, which is information concerning and/or coming from official services and processes, was studied with semi-structured interviews in two contexts in which support with information was needed. Four types of misinformation were found: outdated, conflicting, and incomplete information and perceived intimidation ..read more

Each year, ACRL’s Academic Library Trends and Statistics Survey provides data that can help us understand how academic libraries provide and demonstrate their impact and value to their users, institutions, and communities. Findings from the 2021 survey continued this tradition while also supplying additional insight into how library services and use continued to evolve during the COVID-19 pandemic. The 2021 survey collected data from 1,533 academic libraries in two areas ..read more