Kortext Open Resources Collection: 12 months that mattered
The reliance on open content in higher education is growing.
It’s no secret that rising costs, tightening budgets and more students than ever applying to university means there is increased reliance on open content to ease the strain on library spend.
And we’re not just guessing.
In one of many eye-opening insights from the Kortext Annual Librarian Survey 2025, 67% of librarians reported a rising importance of open content in their academic libraries since 2024.
As a result of this ever-growing need to supplement library supply with free-to-access resources, we’ve looked back on the past year to see how the Kortext Open Resources Collection (KORC) has grown and sparked engagement this past year.
Our 3 biggest takeaways:
1. Content growth
The number of titles available in KORC has increased by 21,497 titles in the past year, to a total of 37,252 titles. Each title is carefully chosen and curated by our team of in-house librarians to produce a collection that is high quality and purpose driven.
Our commitment to expanding our bank of free-to-access resources continues, enhancing the diversity and depth of KORC to support broader research needs and provide a comprehensive set of resources that institutions can draw on in their teaching and learning.
2. Increased use of digital tools
Not only has the number of titles in KORC more than doubled in the past academic year, but there are also encouraging indicators that readers are more actively engaging with the resources.
Smart searches, annotations (notes, highlights) and downloads are all up by a vast percentage. This is indicative of increasing comfort and more widespread adoption of Kortext’s smart study tools, allowing students to engage with their resources and develop a deeper understanding of material that supports their learning.
Evidence of increased engagement encourages us as it demonstrates signs of deeper learning, collaboration using the Kortext Groups feature or even a shift towards a more self-directed approach to study.
3. More time spent studying
Over 3,500 more hours were spent accessing content from KORC in the past year. That means users are spending almost twice as much time (+90.3%) learning from open resources than they were a year ago.
This corresponds well with the increase in pages studied, suggesting that users aren’t remaining idle on a single page, but they are actively engaging with the content, exploring and navigating through their titles.
Our top title
With over 37,000+ titles readily available to Kortext users, we were curious to learn which eBook was most widely used over the past year.
The clear leader was Infections in Surgery (Springer Nature, October 2024) with 1,001 users, 10,832 pages accessed, and 1,569 study sessions.
When reviewing engagement statistics, Scale-ups and High-Growth Firms (Springer Nature, March 2024) stood out with 73 hours of study time and 99 annotations.
What does all this mean anyway?
There’s no doubt that 2024/25 has been a transformative year for the KORC. Not only does our data reflect the growing value of open content as a valuable study resource, but we’ve seen a surge in engagement through increasing study time and smart tool usage, demonstrating a shift towards deeper, more purposeful use of open content.
Why not log in and explore our growing collection for yourself?
Or revisit last year’s blog to see just how far we’ve come.
