Our mission
COARD develops and applies technology and analysis tools that provide insight into the usage and impact of open access scholarly content. We work with publishers, communities and users of scholarly content with the goal of supporting and sustaining a diversity of actors involved in creating and disseminating open access scholarly content.
What we do
Strategic consultancy
COARD provides expert advice to open access monograph presses on tracking and managing the usage of open access books. We can provide advice and support on enhancing the visibility and impact of scholarly content, as well as detailed advice on systems implementation for usage and impact monitoring.
Dashboards and analytics
COARD hosts and manages dashboards for scholarly publishers and works with others to develop new open source technologies. With a focus on small monograph presses we provide a range of technology solutions and systems to enable the tracking, analysis and reporting of open access content usage data.
Data analysis
COARD develops new approaches applying state of the art datascience tools to the analysis of data both big and small relating to content usage. Whether you have large data holdings that you need to process or small and specific data you need help with understanding we can support you to get the best out of your data.
Our history
COARD, standing for Collaborative Open Access Research and Development, is the trading name of Knowledge Unlatched C.I.C. a community interest company registered in the UK. Founded by Dr Frances Pinter in 2012. Between 2012 and 2016 Knowledge Unlatched was focused on developing funding models for open access books. Following several successful pilot rounds that demonstrated the concept the funding operations, name and trademarks of Knowledge Unlatched C.I.C. were transferred to Knowledge Unlatched GmbH (limited liability company) which continues to act as a funding intermediary for open access scholarly books and content.
Under the auspices of KU Research, Knowledge Unlatched C.I.C. continued its technology research and development and consultancy work, with work on a range of projects relating to the usage of open access books. COARD continues this work, with a focus on working with the diverse range of open access book publishers, supporting the development of technology and analysis techniques that show the benefits of open access for long form scholarly content and working to maintain a diversity of actors in the scholarly content space.
Our vision and values
The motivating vision behind COARD is of a diversity of players working to support and publish open access scholarly content, with a focus on monographs. Monograph publishers remains more diverse than journals where there has been greater concentration in the market. Our goal is to support a wide range of publishers, large and small, to be able to continue to serve the diverse needs of authors, readers and others users of scholarly books.
To achieve this we work with partners in the community on specific enabling projects. These may involve the development of technology systems, provision of services, data analysis to demonstrate value or advice for stakeholders on how best to use data and technology to support.
Within the limitations of privacy and the constraints of our partners our goal is to generate resources that are available and re-usable for others. We prefer to work with and develop open source and open data and to work to a high level of transparency and reproducibility. All of these are of course a work in progress and we welcome constructive criticism on how we, and our community, can do better.
Our people
Professor Lucy Montgomery
Lucy’s work focuses on the ways in which open access and open knowledge are transforming landscapes of knowledge production, sharing and use. Lucy was a key member of the small team responsible for developing and successfully piloting Knowledge Unlatched: a globally coordinated, collaborative model for enabling OA for specialist scholarly publications at scale.
Professor Cameron Neylon
Cameron is an international leader and self-confessed agitator in Open Research including Open Access, Open Data, and Open Source as well as the wider technical and social issues of applying the opportunities the internet brings to the practice of research.
Dr Alkim Ozaygen
Alkim has recently completed his PhD looking at the usage of open access scholarly books. He has extensive experience in data science and analytics and in building dashboards and interfaces for publishing stakeholders to engage with data..
