New Report: International Metadata Recommendations and Platform-Specific Requirements for Open Access Books and Chapters | Thoth Open Metadata

DOI: https://doi.org/10.70950/phru7413

We’re pleased to announce the publication of International Metadata Recommendations and Platform-Specific Requirements for Open Access Books and Chapters, a substantial report from Thoth Open Metadata that addresses a longstanding challenge in open access book publishing: how to create, manage, and disseminate metadata that actually works across today’s fragmented scholarly ecosystem.

Bringing together multiple perspectives of not-for-profit Diamond OA book publishers, librarians, and open infrastructures, the report takes a closer look at research, policy analysis, and community insight to support publishers, libraries, and aggregators working to improve the discoverability, accessibility, and sustainability of open access books and chapters – with a particular focus on the needs of small-to-medium-sized, scholar-led and institutional publishing.

Full report: Steiner, T., Arias, J., Bennett, M., Booth, E., Edmunds, J., Gatti, R., Higman, R., Hillen, H., Laakso, M., Nason, M., O'Connell, B., Pogačnik, A., Rabar, U., Ramalho, A., Stone, G., van Gerven Oei, V. W. J., & Wake Hyde, Z. (2026). International Metadata Recommendations, and Platform-Specific Requirements for Open Access Books and Chapters (1.0). Thoth Open Metadata. https://doi.org/10.5281/zenodo.18173982

Open Metadata as shared infrastructure

The authors understand metadata as foundational infrastructure. Metadata determines whether books can be discovered, accessed, preserved, and re-used by readers with different needs, and meaningfully integrated into library systems and research workflows. Yet for long-form publishing, existing metadata practices remain fragmented and opaque, under-resourced, and shaped by a patchwork of different standards, proprietary platforms, and platform-specific requirements.

The report situates these issues within a rapidly changing environment. Evolving policy frameworks, and newly-emerging legal mandates increasingly depend on the availability of high-quality, machine-readable metadata to e.g. provide information on licensing, funding, persistent identifiers, accessibility, and product safety. High-quality metadata has particular relevance for open access, as it underpins almost everything we care about in open access book publishing: discovery, accessibility, assessment, preservation – and active reuse. Yet long-form publishing continues to be inadequately served by the existing fragmentation and silo-ification prevailing within that supply chain. Publishers are routinely expected to deliver metadata in multiple formats (ONIX, MARC, KBART, and more), meet platform-specific requirements, comply with emerging legal and accessibility obligations, and support policy reporting, all while dealing with limited time, staff, and technical capacity. Meanwhile, many of the existing workflows too often lead to mangled metadata that is locked into proprietary systems thanks to restrictive metadata licensing terms that actively suppress downstream re-use and improvement, leading to unnecessary duplication of metadata enhancement work on a global scale.

This report takes that reality seriously. Rather than assuming ideal conditions, it asks what practical, open, and interoperable metadata for books can look like today – and how we can collectively do better.

A two-tiered framework for open book and chapter metadata

At the heart of the report is our collective proposition of a two-tier metadata framework for books and chapters, designed to be both achievable and forward-looking.

• Essential metadata establishes a baseline that we believe should be within reach for all publishers. Such essential metadata includes core bibliographic and access information such as title, contributors, publication date, licence, landing page and full-text URLs, a core set of persistent identifiers at book and chapter level, subject identification via keywords and/or controlled vocabularies where available, and publisher details. In addition, the report strongly advocates for making the metadata record itself available under a permissive open license, ideally releasing that metadata under a public-domain dedication, so that libraries and other services can easily reuse that data without friction.
• Desirable metadata points to where we envision the wider ecosystem to go. This includes the adoption of a richer set of persistent identifiers (ORCID, ROR), controlled vocabularies, multilingual metadata, abstracts, tables of contents, cover images, accessibility metadata, and funder information. We are well aware that not everything listed as 'desirable' is immediately achievable for every publisher, but we believe having a shared direction matters.

The proposed framework is intentionally format-agnostic. It is not about enforcing a single standard or workflow, b