The space of short ropes and the classifying space of the space of long   knots
  We prove affirmatively the conjecture raised by J. Mostovoy; the space of short ropes is weakly homotopy equivalent to the classifying space of the topological monoid (or category) of long knots in $\mathbb{R}^3$. We make use of techniques developed by S. Galatius and O. Randal-Williams to construct a manifold space model of the classifying space of the space of long knots, and we give an explicit map from the space of short ropes to the model in a geometric way. 
Syunji Moriya and Keiichi Sakai
math.AT math.GT