OAPEN and Thoth Open Metadata sign partnership agreement

This blog post was written in collaboration with Toby Steiner, Product Manager at Thoth Open Metadata.

We are excited to announce the signing of a new substantive partnership agreement between the OAPEN Foundation and Thoth Open Metadata.

Thoth Open Metadata is a community-led non-profit platform and service facilitating open metadata management and dissemination workflows for Open Access (OA) books and book chapters. With Thoth, publishers can easily create and distribute metadata in a variety of standard formats such as MARC, ONIX, KBART, and JSON, in numerous variants reflecting specific platforms’ requirements. Thoth’s platform and services assist publishers in the creation, management and dissemination of fully open metadata records for their titles, leading to improved, higher-quality metadata that benefits the entire scholarly communication ecosystem. Thoth also supports an integration of the data, which is released with a CC0 licence, with third-party applications through its open APIs, enabling innovative new content and services to be developed.

The newly-signed agreement is the result of a long-standing and fruitful collaboration between OAPEN and Thoth, which had been established during the early phase of the Community-Led Open Publication Infrastructures for Monographs (COPIM) project (2019–23). Thoth’s subsequent formal incorporation as a UK-based non-profit Community Interest Company in 2022 has opened up exciting ways to further that collaboration between the two entities.

With the recent agreement, Thoth becomes an OAPEN intermediary facilitating direct submission of OA books and corresponding metadata to OAPEN. This is done on behalf of Thoth’s key stakeholder group of small and scholar-led publishers that are using Thoth for easy management and dissemination of their content and metadata. Those books submitted through Thoth will also be listed on the Directory of Open Access Books (DOAB).

Individual publishers using Thoth to submit their OA books to OAPEN will benefit from a full waiver of operational submission fees, while the submission process will be handled directly through Thoth. Teams at OAPEN and Thoth are currently also exploring ways to further improve that submission process by integrating automated steps in the submission of metadata and content to OAPEN in the coming months.

If you are a publisher interested in learning more about Thoth’s capabilities to improve your connections with existing as well as new dissemination channels, and are seeking to open up your content and corresponding metadata to the scholarly community, please do not hesitate to contact Thoth’s Metadata and Publisher Outreach Specialist Hannah Hillen via [email protected].