Spotlight on: Thoth Open Metadata | ALPSP Blog

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.

Tell us about your organization

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. 

What is the project/product that you submitted for the Awards?

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).