KU Select 2026 & KU Focus 2026 Collection
KU Select 2026: Critical Issues in Today’s World
KU Select is a carefully curated Open Access package featuring 200 new, frontlist scholarly books (to be published throughout 2026) that tackle some of the most pressing issues of our time. Spanning the humanities and social sciences, KU’s flagship multi-publisher, multi-disciplinary collection is organized into 8 thematic sub-collections, each addressing vital societal, environmental, and political transformations.
Each thematic collection contains 25 titles selected for scholarly relevance and real-world impact. Curated by KU and its global Librarian Committee comprising hundreds of librarians worldwide, KU Select is designed to help institutions meet research and teaching needs in emerging and interdisciplinary fields.
Libraries supporting KU Select contribute to making high-quality, peer-reviewed academic content openly available to the world’s learners and researchers, advancing global knowledge equity. Click below to learn more about the focus of each collection and how to support it.
Climate Change and Global Warming
This collection focuses on the human, ecological, and legal dimensions of climate change. With works addressing climate justice, resource distribution, decarbonization, and lived environmental realities, the titles engage with adaptation strategies, energy transitions, and policy responses. These books explore how communities and institutions respond to ecological disruption, providing crucial insights for those shaping climate-resilient futures.
Education and Lifelong Learning
Covering pedagogy, knowledge access, equity in education, and the social impact of learning, this collection examines how education shapes societies across generations. The titles investigate formal and informal learning, educational justice, digital transformation in education, and the politics of curriculum and access. It is ideal for libraries supporting researchers and practitioners exploring the transformative role of learning.
Gender and Social Change
This collection traces how gender norms evolve and how individuals and institutions challenge or reinforce them. Books address gender-based violence, intersectionality, labor and care work, masculinities, and feminist movements. The scholarship engages critically with structures of power, offering resources to understand and foster social change across contexts.
Global Health and Resilience
From healthcare systems to psychological trauma, this collection explores how health is shaped by politics, inequality, and crises. Titles examine structural racism, mental health, pandemics, childhood trauma, and healthcare access, providing a multi-layered view of what builds or undermines human resilience. The collection highlights both global patterns and localized responses to health-related challenges.
Inequalities in Social Contexts
This collection interrogates how inequality manifests in labor, housing, race, caste, migration, and economic policy. The titles offer both theoretical frameworks and empirical case studies, drawing attention to systems of exclusion and pathways toward greater equity. These works are critical for scholars examining how social structures affect life outcomes across diverse geographies.
New Economies of Work and Transformation
How is work changing in the 21st century? This collection explores transformations in labor, management, automation, entrepreneurship, and economic governance. With titles spanning local livelihoods and global markets, it focuses on how economic systems adapt, fail, or evolve under pressure—from platform economies to social enterprise and collective bargaining.
Power, Governance, and Political Conflict
This collection focuses on the dynamics of authority, civic participation, public trust, and political polarization. Books cover state legitimacy, populism, disinformation, conflict resolution, and international relations. The titles provide nuanced perspectives on how power operates within and across borders, equipping readers to critically analyze contemporary governance and conflict.
Urban Life and Accountability
Cities are sites of both promise and tension. This collection explores the politics of urban planning, housing, surveillance, mobility, and public space. The titles assess how urban life is shaped by infrastructure, policy, inequality, and citizen agency, offering insights into how more inclusive and accountable urban futures can be built.
Pledging information for libraries
- A collection of 25 books spanning subjects, fields, and publishers
- All books are frontlist, never-before-published titles, scheduled for publication throughout 2026, 2027 and 2028
- Curated by KU, with help from the global publishing community, including university presses, independent publishers, commercial publishers, and Open Access publishers
- Libraries may choose to support the collection for 1 or 3 years (3-year pledges receive 10% discount on Year 1 payment)
- Titles are mapped to broad subject categories as well as UN’s Sustainable Development Goals
- Necessary library pledges to unlatch the collection in full: 165
- Library pledging deadline: September 2nd, 2026
- If the pledging target is not met in full, KU will use the funding received to unlatch as many titles as possible, in cooperation with publishers
- How to pledge: Contact your KU representative or email us at [email protected]
Price of collection per year
KU Focus 2026: Digital Lives
Digital Lives: How Technologies Transform our Contemporary Living is a unique Open Access collection shaped by a new, more collaborative selection process at KU. Unlike KU Select, which is curated by KU’s librarian-led Selection Committee, this collection invited publishers to submit titles they believed address urgent or emerging topics that may not be represented in existing KU packages. The result is a powerful, organically surfaced body of scholarship that explores how digital technologies are transforming every dimension of human life, from identity, creativity, and communication to work, governance, and social relationships.
Libraries that fund Digital Lives help ensure that cutting-edge, interdisciplinary scholarship on the digital condition becomes openly available to all. The collection offers fresh insights into how societies are adapting to–and sometimes resisting–the rapid pace of technological change. From critical studies of AI and surveillance to explorations of online culture, digital labour, and virtual creativity, these titles address questions that affect researchers, educators, policymakers, and the public alike. By supporting Digital Lives, libraries signal their commitment to making sense of the digital transformations that shape our century.
Pledging information for libraries
- A collection of 25 books spanning subjects, fields, and publishers
- All books are frontlist, never-before-published titles, scheduled for publication throughout 2026, 2027 and 2028
- Curated by KU, with help from the global publishing community, including university presses, independent publishers, commercial publishers, and Open Access publishers
- Libraries may choose to support the collection for 1 or 3 years (3-year pledges receive 10% discount on Year 1 payment)
- Titles are mapped to broad subject categories as well as UN’s Sustainable Development Goals
- Necessary library pledges to unlatch the collection in full: 85
- Library pledging deadline: September 2nd, 2026
- If the pledging target is not met in full, KU will use the funding received to unlatch as many titles as possible, in cooperation with publishers
- How to pledge: Contact your KU representative or email us at [email protected]