August 29, 2024
Carol Green

An Interview with Thoth Open Metadata on joining OASPA

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Thoth Open Metadata has recently become a member of OASPA in the Infrastructure & Services (Non-Commercial) category, further enriching the growing community of members. To gain more insight into their recent affiliation with OASPA and to learn more about them, we conducted an interview with Toby Steiner, COO of Thoth Open Metadata.

Q. Tell us a bit about your organisation and the service it provides – and your role within it?

Thoth Open Metadata is a non-profit community interest company (CIC) dedicated to advancing open access publishing and supporting the scholarly community by providing innovative, open metadata management and distribution solutions that are specifically tailored to tackle prevalent issues of getting Open Access books and chapters distributed into the wider book supply chain. Doing so, we help small, scholar-led, and university and library presses with implementing good metadata practice to ensure their valuable outputs are discoverable and accessible in a wide array of book dissemination channels. With the Thoth Open Archiving Network we also provide a community-led approach to the long-term preservation of OA titles so as to ensure that those valuable contributions to the scholarly record are not being lost to future generations.

Q. Why did you decide to join OASPA and what do you hope to get out of your OASPA membership?

Our decision to join OASPA is rooted in our mission to foster the uptake of equitable and community-led open access, which very much overlaps with OASPA’s goal to establish open access as the predominant model of communication for scholarly output. Thoth’s main goal is to help and support OA book publishers with navigating the wider book supply chain. To do that, we have developed a platform and linked dissemination services to enable publishers to create and manage their metadata, and to export their datasets in a variety of industry-standard formats. All metadata records created within Thoth are available for free and released under a public-domain CC0 dedication to enable maximum reuse. We hope to connect and collaborate with interested OASPA member publishers in the coming months and years to raise awareness of the multiple benefits inherent in good metadata practice based on open values and an underlying vision of a future fully open metadata ecosystem. We also seek to be in touch with other OASPA open infrastructure providers to advance smooth metadata distribution throughout the OA book publishing supply chain. We are convinced that Thoth’s platform and the non-profit dissemination, hosting and archiving services provided under Thoth Plus will be useful for publishers interested in opening up their publishing practices and workflows.

Q. How is your organization showing its commitment to making globally equitable participation in open scholarly communication a reality?

Similar to OASPA, Thoth strongly advocates for Open Scholarship in all its (biblio)diversity. Together with our partner infrastructures with whom we are collaborating in the context of the Open Book Futures project and beyond, we are convinced that equitable open access can only be realised when adhering to open practices based on open infrastructures and open data. With Thoth, we are seeking to alleviate major barriers faced predominantly by smaller, scholar-led, and university and library publishers who often only have very limited resources available to tackle the myriad tasks required to effectively disseminate and archive their Open Access books. By providing fully open, community-led solutions, Thoth is actively tackling these major barriers to equal participation in open scholarly communication that are faced particularly by smaller, scholar-led as well as university and library publishers from all over the globe.

Q. What do you think are the main challenges for funders and institutions to overcome to better incentivise open publishing practices as a positive contribution to career development?

We believe there are a number of systemic challenges that need to be faced collectively. One particular challenge that funders and institutions could help overcome is the question of research assessment, and corresponding issue of “prestige”. Advocates have highlighted a number of ways over the years of how to facilitate more open and inclusive assessment of research – with CoARA, DORA, and the Leiden Manifesto being important initiatives in this space – so as to enable researchers to more actively work towards embedding open research practices in their respective fields. We also want to highlight the variety of actions that researchers might be able to take on different levels of engagement, as highlighted e.g. by Tennant et. al. 2019.

More fundamentally, we also believe it will be crucial to more centrally introduce open and not-for-profit values to the open publishing ecosystem. Doing so would mean a more active engagement of funders and institutions in moving away from a still widely-practised piecemeal approach of supporting individual outputs and corresponding inequitable funding via Book Processing Charges (BPCs). We argue that funders and institutions should shift towards more fundamentally supporting the activities of not-for-profit infrastructure providers and publishers that form the cornerstones of such a community- and values-led open publishing ecosystem.

Q. How do you think OASPA can help mitigate those challenges?

OASPA has a broad and diverse membership and has always celebrated that diversity as an important aspect of a vibrant open scholarly publishing ecosystem. OASPA can facilitate interaction and collaboration between members to advocate for and implement community-based solutions and represent the interests of the smallest publishers who don’t have the resources for direct advocacy to funders, policy makers, etc.