KU Spotlight Newsletter

KU Spotlight Newsletter: Issue 1

Featured in this issue: Iowa State University and Open Access, the success of the subscribe-to-open (S2O) model, a Q&A with KU’s Wilson de Souza and KU’s webinar dates.

Sep 23, 2020

Pablo Markin, Mirela Roncevic, Wilson de Souza, Bob Schatz & Philipp Hess

5 contributors

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Dear librarians,

Welcome to our revamped quarterly newsletter.

We call it KU Spotlight since in each issue we put a spotlight on the parts of KU that speak of who we are and what we do: our people, the libraries we work with, and the Open Access (OA) trends we follow or initiate. This issue includes:

A Q&A with KU’s Wilson de Souza
Thoughts from Iowa State’s Curtis Brundy
Intro to the Subscribe-to-Open model

We hope you enjoy reading about our team as we truly are an international bunch; hearing from fellow librarians on why and how they invest in OA, and learning about the latest OA trends and groundbreaking initiatives. The goal is to give you insight into how KU is progressing with OA and to share some facts about us that you may not be aware of.

Lastly, another autumn is upon us, which means another KU pledging round is in full swing. As you’ve come to expect, we’ll soon be holding several regional webinars to help librarians understand pledging options this year. Please register by clicking on the links below. Attending our webinars is a great way to meet our sales team and ask questions.

Thanks for your support and please note: this year‘s deadline for pledging support is November 27.

Wishing you a great semester, online and offline.

Stay well.

Alexandra, Amir, Bob, Catherine, Elaine, Laurens, Max, Mirela, Pablo, Philipp, Wilson, and Sven

Spotlight on...

Iowa State University

Iowa State University (ISU) has been a long-time supporter of Open Access. Not only has the library loyally supported KU’s flagship collection, KU Select, for several years, it supports several other partner initiatives, including the newly launched Pluto Open Journals initiative. ISU’s Associate University Library for Scholarly Communications and Collections, Curtis Brundy, offers some thoughts on why ISU continues to invest in its relationship with KU.

“Iowa State University (ISU) is a public land grant university in the United States with a mission to share the knowledge it creates to make Iowa and the world a better place. At the University Library, we strive to advance this mission through our support and advocacy for OA. The successful transition to OA is going to require many different approaches. At ISU, we are entering into open access agreements with publishers, supporting open infrastructure projects, and working directly with societies and university presses to find sustainable transition strategies. Along the way, we have developed many productive relationships that are helping us with this work.

Our relationship with KU is one we value and continue to grow, as it provides a creative and effective mechanism for unlocking a significant amount of scholarly content. KU’s work supporting innovative publishers like Berghahn Books with their Open Anthro Subscribe-to-Open initiative is exemplary, as are other offerings ISU has supported, including the International Water Association Press Books, a university press collection of archaeology titles, and KU Select HSS Books, a broad-based collection of titles representing a wide variety of publishers and HSS disciplines. These are the types of partnerships we need to see more of and that our library will continue to support as we accelerate our investing in OA.

KU has been part of ISU’s OA strategy for several years now. We look forward to continuing to support KU’s future efforts advancing OA.”

If each of the 8 million uses of KU content made Open Access worldwide was represented by a euro, the total would weigh 60,000 kg. That’s impact!

The average book is 3.25 inches thick and the average story in a building is 10.8 feet high. If we stacked the 2000 books KU has unlatched to date, the pile would reach higher than a 50-story building!

Spotlight on...

Subscribe-to-Open

If you’ve been reading about OA
trends or engaging in OA discussions the past year, you’ve surely noticed a lot of attention being given to the Subscribe-to-Open (S20) OA model, and for good reasons. If the success KU has had with this model recently is any indication, S20 is proving to be a sustainable approach for converting journals to OA in a way that makes sense for libraries and publishers.

Conceived by Libraria, a group of
anthropologists and other social scientists committed to OA and first initiated by Annual Reviews, the S20 model is, put simply, a library subscription that converts closed journals to OA journals. Institutions subscribe to the journals they’ve been subscribing to in the normal fashion and, if sufficient funding is collected, those journals are flipped to OA and made freely available worldwide. There is more to this, of course, but the bottom line is that more publishers are showing interest in S20 and are willing to try it out.

KU is pleased to offer two S20 pledging options for libraries in 2020, with more on the horizon. The first is Berghahn Open Antro (BOA), an initiative to flip a collection of noted anthropology journals to OA, which was successfully
piloted in 2019 and which KU will continue offering to libraries wanting to contribute to BOA‘s long-term success. The second is the newly launched Pluto Open Journals pilot seeking to flip the political science publisher’s entire journal portfolio to OA using the S20 model, with the help from KU.

To learn more about how the S20 model works, we recommend these two articles from the Scholarly Kitchen:

Subscribe to Open: A Mutual Assurance Approach to Open Access

Subscribe to Open: Annual Reviews’ Take on Open Access

Spotlight on...

KU's Wilson de Souza

Wilson de Souza is KU’s Regional Manager for Ibero-America, Oceania, Africa and Asia. He hails from Brazil, has a long history in the book business, loves art and music and, as this Q&A reveals, loves living in Berlin because it affords him a mixture of urban and rural experiences.

Tell us about your background.

I was born in São Paulo; however, I spent my adolescence in a small town in the Brazilian countryside, called Paraguaçu Paulista. Reading was always my companion, and I decided that books would also be my career when I returned to São Paulo at the age of 18. I worked in large bookstore chains in Brazil, where I faced different challenges in the commercial area or managing and training teams in different cities. I also participated and helped organize events with big names in literature, such as, for example, Mia Couto and Jose Saramago. In parallel, I studied Marketing and specialized in Human Resources.

What is the best part about working at KU now?

The diversity of the team and being at the center of a movement that is changing the way we understand and relate to scientific knowledge.

What is the most challenging part about working at KU now?

To maintain resilience, even when responses from libraries are not immediate.

What do you most look forward to in your job?

It is an area of constant learning. I hope that soon the regions I cover for KU (South America, among them), will soon awaken to the benefits of supporting the Open Access movement.

What is your favorite book?

I always change my answer when asked this. Today I would say “Never Let Me Go” by Kazuo Ishiguro. It’s a masterpiece. Maybe tomorrow I will say “Embers” by the Hungarian author Sandor Marai.

What is your favorite movie?

Dogville, by Lars Von Trier. When the script is good, you don't even need a scenario.

What songs are playing on your phone?

While working, a playlist called “Mozart Classical Musical for Brain Power” helps me stay focused. At the gym or when I go out for a run, The Killers' new album called “Imploding the Mirage” is quite liberating.

Any guilty pleasures?

Musicals, I love them! I recently watched Hamilton and listened to the same songs again and again until I memorized the lyrics.

What quote best sums up your worldview?

“In everything you do…Always be yourself, Billy…And you always will be true.”

What languages do you speak?

Portuguese, Spanish and English. I am currently working on improving my German.

What’s it like living in Berlin?

Berlin is the balance I was looking for between life in a metropolis and in the countryside. If you want to visit art galleries, go to major events, parties, and restaurants, you will find it all here. But if you also want to take a summer day out to read by the lake, swim or walk through parks and forests, you can do that, too. I love it here.

What do you most miss about Brazil?

Friends and family. And mangos. I love mangos, but they are expensive in Germany.

How did you spend your last vacation?

It was an exciting cultural trip. I visited the Neuschwanstein castle, designed by Ludwig II (who inspired the famous Disney castle). I also visited Weimar and learned a lot about Goethe’s incredible trajectory and his friendship with Schiller. Then I went to Salzburg, Mozart’s birthplace and the place where The Sound of Music was recorded. And I took a trip to “Hamburger Kunsthalle” an art gallery in Hamburg, just to see up close my favorite Caspar David Friedrich painting, “The Wanderer above the Sea of Fog.” How did I do it all in just five days? I have no clue!

How do you like your coffee?

Coffee is always close to me in the morning. Black, no sugar.

How global is our small team?

KU is proud that
we can help librarians and publishers in Chinese, Croatian/Serbian, Dutch,
English, French, German, Hebrew, Portuguese, Russian, Spanish and Ukrainian.