This year, the judges have selected four finalists for the ALPSP Award for Innovation in Publishing.
The finalists will be showcased in a lightning presentation session at the ALPSP Conference on 10 September, with the winners announced at the ALPSP Conference Awards Dinner.
In this series, we learn more about each of the finalists and their entries.
Thoth Open Metadata is a UK-registered non-profit community interest company (CIC) dedicated to advancing open access (OA) publishing and supporting the scholarly community by providing innovative, open metadata management and distribution solutions that are specifically tailored to tackle prevalent issues of getting OA books and chapters distributed into the wider book supply chain.
In doing so, Thoth helps small, scholar-led, university and library presses with implementing good metadata practice, to ensure their valuable outputs are discoverable and accessible in a wide array of book dissemination channels and archive repositories.
At the core of our services is Thoth’s platform – a free one-stop solution to efficiently manage and expose open metadata via open APIs under a CC0 dedication, in various industry standards incl. ONIX 2.1, 3.0 and 3.1, MARC, KBART, JSON, and Crossref XML DOI deposits.
We offer publishers a two-tiered service:
Thoth Free: Publishers have free and unlimited self-service access to the Thoth platform, through which they can create, manage and export metadata following diverse industry standards as well as platform-specific configurations.
Thoth Plus: Publishers are provided with a set of managed services covering aspects of automated DOI registration, sending metadata and book files to key stakeholders in the larger book supply chain, as well as the archiving of long-form scholarship on behalf of a publisher.
Thoth also offers additional services such as bespoke metadata creation, data ingest of back catalogues into the Thoth database, and hosting of book files via Thoth File Hosting. As an extension, Thoth Website Hosting offers a customisable website template tailored to the needs of OA publishers and consortia / organisations managing OA book catalogues. Thoth’s re-usable white-label approach to hosting is already being used in Thoth’s own website and central metadata catalogue, while also powering an increasing number of publisher and consortia websites such as those of Open Book Publishers, and the consortium of Netherlands University Presses (currently under development).
 |
| Poster Source: https://doi.org/10.5281/zenodo.15672341 |
With bibliodiversity and equitable sustainability as two of Thoth’s key tenets, engagement with publishers from a variety of regional contexts was sought early on. Thoth was conceived from the start as a fully open dissemination system.
This poster showcases the metadata workflow of a collection of small scholar-led as well as institutional publishers, through the usage of the Thoth platform. Using Thoth, metadata can be ingested, managed, and exported to a variety of major content platforms and ebook aggregators in the global book supply chain, incl. EBSCOHost, ProQuest Ebook Central, Google Books, JSTOR, Project MUSE, and OAPEN, as well as metadata indexes incl. the Directory of Open Access Books (DOAB), OCLC WorldCat, Web of Science, etc. Benefitting from Thoth’s role as an official Crossref sponsor, publishers can automatically register DOIs for books and chapters, and Thoth supports good metadata practice through the use of open and persistent identifiers. OA titles are archived via the Thoth Open Archiving Network, a community-led, transparent and open approach to preserving the scholarly record.
We believe it is also crucial to highlight that Thoth has been developed by publishers, for publishers. Thoth’s community-led governance model is exemplified by its Board of Directors, which comprises representatives from award-winning independent Diamond OA publishers Open Book Publishers, punctum books, and Mattering Press.
Metadata is a crucial part of the publishing process for both open access and non-OA works, and publishers have highlighted a central need for an open system to create and manage metadata. Therefore, Thoth’s open platform and services are understood as an important intervention in the OA book ecosystem, leveraging the power of open data to connect to other key infrastructures and services.
In our exchanges with 70+ individual publishers, associations and networks from across the globe, one key element raised as a major difficulty faced particularly by small and medium-sized publishers is the implementation of metadata workflows on commercial platforms, with high complexity and costs usually associated with these processes. This presents a steep barrier for publishers seeking to participate in the larger OA book dissemination ecosystem. Thoth’s platform and services provide an important, equitable and accessible resource that is making publishers’ lives easier on a daily basis.
Everything we do at Thoth is open. Our software is open source, tailor-made for OA book metadata, and our metadata is released under a CC0 dedication permitting sharing and reuse. Our open APIs offer seamless integration with other platforms.
Moreover, at Thoth, we firmly believe in providing publishers with the freedom to choose their own path. Our commitment to openness ensures that publishers are not locked in to any specific platform or service, and all data created within Thoth can be exported in multiple formats - thus making it easy for publishers to move to another service should they want to stop using Thoth. Thoth's open architecture and APIs empower publishers to integrate seamlessly with other platforms and workflows, allowing for greater flexibility and adaptability, such as through the use of the Thoth-Open Monographs Press plugin. Thoth enables publishers to retain full control over their data and operations. With Thoth, you're not just accessing a platform – you're joining a community-driven ecosystem built on the principles of openness, collaboration, and innovation.
This is also reflected in our work to establish close connections with key infrastructures active in the field of Open Access publishing. As a result, Thoth has now been established as a sponsor with Crossref, become a full member of European research infrastructure network OPERAS as well as OASPA, and signed collaboration agreements with the OAPEN Foundation and the Directory of Open Access Books (DOAB) to formalise already-existing close working relationships with each of those infrastructures.
Having established the foundational technical capabilities for open book metadata, we are now developing collaborations with other open infrastructures to enhance interoperability and create robust open infrastructures. We are working closely with like-minded stakeholders active in the field of OA book publishing e.g. with the Public Knowledge Project, OAPEN, DOAB, and Crossref, and have recently founded a Working Group within the OPERAS network dedicated to Open Infrastructures for OA Books, which is jointly being coordinated by Thoth and the Open Book Collective. Moreover, Thoth is listed in Invest in Open Infrastructure’s InfraFinder, the OPERAS Pathfinder, and the European Diamond Capacity Hub Registry, is a Signatory and active contributor to the Barcelona Declaration on Open Research Information, and contributes to the Collaborative Metadata (COMET) community of practice.
Later this year we will be unveiling our new Thoth Usage Statistics dashboard, offering publishers robust, privacy-focused insights into the usage of their open-access books and chapters. Leveraging the OPERAS Metrics platform to provide aggregated and standardised open data across multiple platforms, Thoth’s service is tailored to help publishers understand and optimise the impact of their publications.
In the next years Thoth will be working towards sustainability and resilience, and will continue to connect, develop and adapt, as we focus on:
Automating distribution to platforms in the OA ecosystem and global book supply chain
Assisting publishers in improving metadata quality, while also implementing good metadata practice for books and chapters alike
Implementing our multilingual interface, and extended metadata schema
Exposing Thoth’s database via OAI-PMH and investigating provision of OPDS, while also looking to integrate additional export formats such as BIBFRAME.
Supporting publishers with legal deposit of books with national libraries in a global context, as well as with their local ISBN registration workflows
Extending the uptake of open infrastructure by libraries
Hannah Hillen
Her ORCID: https://orcid.org/0009-0004-9521-0445
More information
Bluesky: @thoth-metadata.bsky.social
Mastodon: https://hcommons.social/@Thoth_metadata
Web: https://thoth.pub/
No comments:
Post a Comment