Thoth Open Metadata Management and Distribution Service for OA Books

Our poster showcases Thoth Open Metadata (https://thoth.pub/), a non-profit open metadata management and dissemination service for OA books and book chapters.

The difficulties associated with open access book and chapter metadata are well recognised: siloed or platform-specific metadata or metadata that is not openly licensed or tailored to OA books. This is particularly problematic for small and scholar-led publishers, who are required to submit metadata in multiple different formats to an array of different parties. This data is then often overwritten or degraded across the book distribution system. This is also problematic for third parties interested in creating services for users that rely on metadata records maintained across multiple platforms or publishers.

Thoth seeks to help smaller publishers with creating and disseminating truly open, CC0-licensed metadata of their Open Access books via an open-source one-stop platform. Several publishers have now adopted Thoth as their metadata manager to create, manage and distribute metadata in multiple formats including platform-specific flavours of ONIX, MARC, JSON, and KBART that fulfil requirements of e.g. OAPEN, Project MUSE, JSTOR, Google Books, and others, while also being able to submit book and chapter-level metadata to CrossRef for DOI registration, and to archive content in university repositories and the Internet Archive via the Thoth Archiving Network prototype. Third-party applications such as by the Open Book Collective, the ScholarLed consortium, and Open Book Publishers have also begun to utilise Thoth’s open APIs as a trusted and open source of book metadata to create novel content and services.