Open Access for Books: Applying an International Lens

Dr Frances Pinter, eminent academic publisher, will take us on a journey through her thoughts on innovations in scholarly open‑access publishing, including initiatives she has started such as Knowledge Unlatched.

As a publisher Dr Pinter has helped to shape disciplines that tackle some of today’s defining social and technological challenges, and as an activist and architect of new publishing she has driven public debate, promoted development, and encouraged the foundations of civil society in some of the world’s most troubled regions.
— Curtin University Vice Chancellor, Deborah Terry

Knowledge Unlatched is a not-for-profit company working to create a sustainable route to open-access academic publishing for the benefit of institutions, publishers and readers. Through Knowledge Unlatched, an international consortium of affiliated libraries provides collective payments to help ‘unlatch’ books and make them freely available to readers worldwide via their open-access platform.

At the age of 23, Frances Pinter was the first woman to establish her own publishing company in the UK. In the years that followed, she became a major force in the evolution of academic publishing. She has been a consistent trailblazer in the implementation and adoption of new technologies and business models that increase access to valuable scholarly outputs for communities around the world. In 2015, Dr Pinter was awarded an Honorary Doctorate of Letters by Curtin University for her contribution to scholarly publishing. She is an Adjunct Professor of Curtin University’s The Centre for Culture and Technology under its New Models of Publishing research program, and also runs Knowledge Unlatched Research.