KU Open Services
KU Open Services provides a distribution channel of Open Access books through established scholarly platforms without the need to manage multiple platform relationships directly. As a trusted intermediary, KU manages onboarding, metadata, and distribution workflows while increasing the visibility of publisher titles. Publishers benefit from a simple and efficient route to extend the reach, discoverability, and impact of their OA content with minimal administrative burden.
How do KU Open Services work?
Your Partner for Complete Open Access Support
Publishing an Open Access book is only the beginning. Ensuring that content is discoverable, accurately catalogued, preserved, and reported across multiple platforms requires specialist infrastructure and ongoing management.
Rather than managing multiple providers independently, publishers work with KU to coordinate hosting, metadata distribution, discovery, preservation and usage reporting through one trusted partner.
What is Included?
Hosting
KU manages the hosting of Open Access books through the OAPEN Library, with optional JSTOR hosting available for eligible publishers.
Discovery & Metadata
Making books Open Access is only valuable if readers can find them.
KU prepares and distributes high-quality metadata, including MARC 21, MARCXML and KBART records, and ensures titles are indexed across major library discovery services including:
- DOAB
- Ex Libris
- EBSCO
- OCLC
- Google Scholar
- Google Search
This helps maximize discoverability for libraries and researchers worldwide.
Usage Reporting
KU coordinates quarterly usage reporting to the best of our abilities across participating platforms.
Long-term Preservation
Titles are preserved through Portico via OAPEN, with additional preservation available for publishers choosing optional JSTOR hosting.
Metadata & Content Management
KU manages the ingestion process from metadata submission through to distribution, helping publishers ensure their content is processed efficiently and consistently across supported platforms.
Why Work with KU?
Managing Open Access distribution across multiple systems can be time-consuming and complex. KU Open Services provides a single point of coordination, allowing publishers to benefit from established workflows, trusted industry partnerships and extensive experience supporting Open Access books.
Whether you’re publishing a single title or managing an entire Open Access programme, KU helps ensure your content is discoverable, accessible and professionally managed throughout its lifecycle.
Interested in KU Open Services?
If you’d like to discuss KU Open Services for your publishing programme, we’d be delighted to hear from you.
The first step for interested publishers is to initiate a partnership with KU and complete a contract. Once that’s done, publishers are asked to complete this spreadsheet with all relevant title information. Publishers are welcome to include multiple books on one spreadsheet.
In addition, KU will need the PDF files, named to include the title’s primary ISBN. If the files are too large to send via email, we request that a service for upload and retrieval (WeTransfer or dropbox) is used. Our team will help with these details. The KU team will review, upload, and complete the process for you.
As soon as the books have been officially made Open Access, KU will send the invoice.
To participate, please contact: shallmark@annualreviews.org