Multinational science publisher Wiley announced the acquisition of the commercial open access service Knowledge Unlatched (KU) in a press release on Thursday 2 December 2021. Wiley has been a DEAL contract partner since 2019 and is the third-largest publisher in terms of the proportion of publications with German participation that appear there annually. KU supports authors and publishers in publishing books and journals in open access by collecting funding commitments from libraries via a crowdfunding model. With the acquisition of the platform, Wiley also takes over OABLE - a workflow management tool that supports libraries in managing OA publications. Among other things, the tool collects information on journal articles or books, checks compliance with funding rules and supports approval processes within a university.
"Wiley and Knowledge Unlatched share a commitment to making open access simple and easy for everyone," says Jay Flynn, Wiley executive vice president and general manager, in the publisher's official press release. KU's previous owner, Sven Fund, expresses the same sentiments in a letter posted on the Open Research Community website. He also justifies the sale with the platform's small budget. The takeover by Wiley, he argues, would allow KU to grow. Fund, for its part, had acquired KU from founder Frances Pinter in 2016.
The merger is another example of the concentration processes that have been observed for some time in the field of commercial OA publishing. In an article on the topic, the online magazine iRIGHTS.info also sees indications of a larger trend: "Major publishers are increasingly trying to commercialise OA and to develop new business areas." What changes the purchase of KU by Wiley will bring for the publishers and libraries involved as wel as for the OA transformation as a whole will be eagerly observed in the coming months.
Read the press release from Wiley here: https://newsroom.wiley.com/press-releases/press-release-details/2021/Wiley-Acquires-Open-Access-Innovator-Knowledge-Unlatched/default.aspx