OPERAS welcomes Thoth | OPERAS - open scholarly communication in the european research area for social sciences and humanities

We are glad to welcome Thoth Open Metadata as a new ordinary member of the OPERAS community.

Thoth is a metadata management and dissemination platform and service specifically tailored to tackle the problems of getting Open Access books into the wider supply chain. Thoth enables publishers to ingest, create, manage and export fully open, CC0-licensed metadata for their books in a variety of formats and platform-specific flavours of e.g. MARC, KBART, JSON, and ONIX via open APIs, and facilitates the dissemination of OA books to metadata and content aggregator platforms as well as into repositories participating in the Thoth Archiving Network. https://thoth.pub/.

Developed in the context of the Copim community, an international partnership of researchers, universities, librarians, open access book publishers and infrastructure providers collaborating to build community-owned, open systems and infrastructures to enable Open Access book publishing to flourish, Thoth Open Metadata is a spin-off of the project of the same name (COPIM, 2019–23) and has been registered as an independent, non-profit CIC in the UK in 2022.

Since its inception as a community-led infrastructure initiative, Thoth has been working closely with key COPIM and OPERAS stakeholders Jisc, the OAPEN Foundation and a variety of European and international open access publishers over the past years.

As a key stakeholder in the COPIM successor project Open Book Futures funded by UKRI/Research England and Arcadia, Thoth now seeks to expand its operations to support small and medium publishers internationally, while also engaging with other open infrastructures such as the OAPEN Book Analytics service developed by Curtin Open Knowledge Initiative (COKI), OpenAlex, WikiData, the Public Knowledge Project, and many more. For more on Thoth’s activities, please refer to Thoth’s recent blog post in which the team provides a recap of their work done during 2023.

“We are really excited and grateful to have been invited to join the OPERAS network – it’s truly amazing to see so much happening in the open infrastructure landscape right now!

For us at Thoth, the OPERAS membership is a logical next step in our collective endeavour towards establishing an open ecosystem for Open Access books. Under the remit of the Open Book Futures grant, we are already collaborating with a number of key OPERAS stakeholders such as Jisc, OpenEdition, OAPEN/DOAB, OABN, and Open Book Publishers. With Thoth now becoming a member of OPERAS, we are very much looking forward to working with the larger OPERAS network to help small and medium-sized publishers across Europe with making their book metadata available in an open and transparent way, while also increasing bibliodiversity by making multilingual content and corresponding metadata available through Thoth.”

Rupert Gatti, director Thoth Open Metadata

Going forward, Thoth will be contributing to the “Platforms and Services”, “Multilingualism”, and “Open Access Books Network” Special Interest Groups.

OPERAS 

OPERAS is the Research Infrastructure supporting open scholarly communication in the social sciences and humanities (SSH) in the European Research Area. Its mission is to coordinate and federate resources in Europe to efficiently address the scholarly communication needs of European researchers in the field of SSH. OPERAS’ aim is to make Open Science a reality for research in the SSH and achieve a scholarly communication system where knowledge produced in the SSH benefits researchers, academics, students and, more generally, the whole society across Europe and worldwide, without barriers.

If you want to know more, contact us and find more information on joining OPERAS here: https://operas-eu.org/about/want-to-know-more/want-to-join-operas/

OPERAS Coordinator Community: Pierre Mounier pierre.mounier@operas-eu.org