Putting the 'Open' in 'Thoth Open Archiving Network' | Copim

Higman, R., Cole, G., Gatti, R., Arias, J., Steiner, T., Stokes, P., Wheatley, P., Barnes, M., & McGann, C. (2025). Putting the “Open” in “Thoth Open Archiving Network.” Copim. https://doi.org/10.21428/785a6451.76e96572

Over the course of both the COPIM and OBF projects, the Archiving and Preservation work package team has gathered a lot of insight into the scope of archiving challenges for smaller open-access publishers, and the finer points of mitigating them. Through discussions with stakeholders, desk research, and practical technical investigation, a more nuanced picture has emerged than anticipated at the project’s beginning. With this knowledge, we will now turn to developing our nascent archiving solution to be effective, flexible, and targeted firmly towards open-access principles.

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We identified the following features as essential to an open archiving solution:

• Openly accessible content

• Openly accessible metadata

• Openly verifiable processes:

  • Publishing checksums to allow verification of content integrity

  • Transparent version control (for both content and metadata)

  • Clear mechanisms for checking and maintaining the content

• Reliability and long-term sustainability

• Multiple geographically-redundant copies

And these additional features as highly desirable:

• Support for retrieving and archiving associated content:

  • “Additional materials” provided to supplement the main content

  • Web pages represented by URLs within the main content

• Clearly-stated policies around removal of content

• Collation of usage statistics

• Independence from private or government-controlled entities

The first essential attribute - openly accessible content - would be expected to go without saying. However, existing archiving solutions are often geared towards handling copyrighted items, and therefore do not make content openly available until this is deemed necessary. (Much like in our conversations with national libraries, stakeholders who are amenable to altering this in principle have tended to find that the weight of the established workflow is against them in practice.) We will now centre our efforts around archives which not only make content fully public from the point of deposit, but also meet the other essential needs of reliability and transparency. Our investigations found that high-capacity generalist repositories were often the most likely to provide these crucial features.

Therefore, as a minimum viable product, we will ensure that all TOAN content and metadata is archived in both Internet Archive and Zenodo, as well as continuing our trusted partnerships with the Loughborough University and Cambridge University Library repositories, to ensure a presence for all archived works outside the governmental and for-profit ecosystems. To connect these archives into a network, we will develop additional software features (themselves open-source and openly verifiable), continuing to build on the open metadata system provided by Thoth. These will include open storage and regular checking of archive-provided checksums, and timestamped update mechanisms including the reason for the update.