Open Metadata, Open Ecosystems: Collaborations between university and library publishers and open infrastructures to boost discoverability of open (text)books (Panel held at OER26) | Zenodo

Tatham, S., Nieborg, M., Bowie, S., Corti, P., McLeod, J., & Steiner, T. (2026, June 22). Open Metadata, Open Ecosystems: Collaborations between university and library publishers and open infrastructures to boost discoverability of open (text)books. Zenodo. Open Education Conference 2026 (OER26), Milton Keynes, UK. https://doi.org/10.5281/zenodo.21377589

For many, openness in education requires attention not only to the open licenses and permissions assigned to the products of intellectual labour, but also to the practices, infrastructures, and networks developed and maintained throughout the manifold knowledge production processes. While open textbooks and long‑form OER rightly occupy a large part of the open education landscape, their impact is often constrained by limited findability which effectively hampers reuse across institutions and platforms. Discoverability of open publications requires consideration not only of traditional editorial processes around the work’s content, but intentional care for metadata, hosting and distribution, aggregation, archiving, and usage monitoring. This panel positions metadata work not as a technical afterthought but as a core site of open practice, where intentional choices and commitments to open standards, community governance, and shared, not-for-profit community-led infrastructure can better support the long‑term sustainability of open knowledge.

Drawing on collaboration between the LIBER Educational Resources Working Group, SPARC Europe, European university and library publishers, Pressbooks, and Thoth Open Metadata, this panel will demonstrate how academic libraries and university publishers can adopt open metadata workflows spanning the full lifecycle of open access and open educational books. Using examples from current pilots and planned integrations, the panel will explore how open ecosystems can be built around three interlocking elements: open-source publishing platforms such as Pressbooks; implementation of open dissemination and archiving workflows (high-quality, re-usable metadata) via not-for-profit open infrastructures such as Thoth Open Metadata; and the dissemination of open content to discovery and usage layers that connect books to readers, including aggregators, directories, usage monitoring systems, repositories, and library discovery services.

The panel will provide a practical demonstration of how collaborations between university libraries, publishing programmes, and open infrastructures can embed open metadata practices within open publishing workflows. Doing this well requires easy-to-use open source tools that enable creators and publishers of open access monographs, edited collections, and OER textbooks to generate rich, machine-readable metadata without needing specialist expertise in database structures or complex specifications. Representatives from European academic libraries and university or library publishing programmes will show how they are integrating publishing platforms with an open and high-quality metadata framework via interoperable APIs provided through Thoth, and how these metadata records are then automatically exported into a multiplicity of formats incl. MARC, ONIX, KBART, and Crossref XML - all of which then foster findability and easy re-use via local catalogues, national repositories, and global open indexes.

The panel will open with a short demonstration of an existing API-based workflow built entirely with open-source tools to support end-to-end open publishing. Panelists will then reflect on successes, tensions, and questions about e.g. how educational use cases might map onto standardised metadata fields and how metadata can remain aligned as content is revised, versioned, and remixed over time. By foregrounding this often invisible care work, the panel aims to show how shared metadata infrastructure can make open books more visible, reusable, and sustainable across diverse institutional contexts.