Open access (OA) is rapidly becoming the dominant model for scholarly book publishing, creating an urgent need for open, standard-compliant metadata and persistent identifiers (PIDs) across workflows, library systems, and preservation infrastructures. This presentation reports findings from a recent landscape study reviewing international metadata standards for OA books and chapters, with a focus on small-to-medium-sized publishers. The study highlights persistent challenges in adopting PIDs to improve discoverability of long-form scholarship, and proposes practical steps to strengthen metadata practices across the publishing lifecycle. It then introduces a format-agnostic metadata framework aligned with international recommendations and open science principles, designed to be robust yet adaptable. Finally, the talk demonstrates how Thoth Open Metadata operationalises this framework through an open platform enabling FAIR, CC0 metadata creation, multi-format exports, automated dissemination, DOI registration, and integration across the scholarly communication ecosystem and services broadly.
With open access (OA) rapidly becoming the mainstream model for scholarly book publishing, the integration of open, standard-compliant metadata and PIDS into publishing workflows, library systems, and preservation infrastructures becomes increasingly urgent. The proposed presentation reports on key findings from a recent landscape study ( https://doi.org/10.5281/zenodo.18173982 ) that reviewed international metadata standards and requirements for OA books and chapters, and focused on the needs of small-to-medium-sized, scholar-led and institutional university and library publishers. Doing so, the study identified persistent challenges regarding the adoption of PIDs and controlled vocabularies to enhance discoverability of a publisher’s valuable long-form contributions to the scholarly record, and then outlines practical steps to improve open metadata practice across the long-form publishing lifecycle.
Building on this analysis, the talk introduces an extended, format-agnostic metadata framework for OA books and chapters that is aligned with more general international recommendations for long-form publishing incl. NISO and NAG recommendations, or the Diamond OA Standard. The framework is also compatible with open science and open data principles such as that of the Barcelona Declaration on Open Research Information, and also takes into account the multiple requirements put forward by major metadata aggregators active in the scholarly book supply chain. Designed to be both robust and adaptable, it supports wide dissemination while remaining responsive to future policy and infrastructure developments.
The presentation then demonstrates how Thoth Open Metadata operationalises this framework through a freely available, open-source metadata management platform. Drawing on examples from independent, library-based, and university presses across Europe, North America, Latin America, and Africa, we show how publishers can retain control over fully open (CC0) and FAIR high-quality metadata that follows good metadata practice. Using the Thoth platform, they can then automatically export their data in multiple industry-standard formats including MARC, ONIX3, KBART, and Crossref XML via open APIs. Finally, we illustrate how Thoth enables seamless dissemination to major OA platforms, automated DOI registration, library integration, and transparent open archiving, while maintaining a format-agnostic upstream source for high-quality open metadata for OA books and chapters.
Toby Steiner COO of Thoth Open Metadata, a non-profit, community-led metadata management and dissemination platform based in Cambridge, UK. He also works on collaborative outreach across infrastructures for the Copim Open Book Futures project, and co-coordinates the OPERAS Open Infrastructures for OA Books Working Group. He is a co-convener of the Radical Open Access Collective and sits on the Editorial Advisory Board for the OAPEN Open Access Books Toolkit.