Thoth nominated for the 2026 ALPSP Award for Innovation in Publishing

ALPSP Awards Badge Innovation Finalist

We have a wonderful reason to celebrate—Thoth Open Metadata has been named a finalist for the 2026 ALPSP Award for Innovation in Publishing! Following our shortlist nomination in late June and a presentation early July to the judging panel by our COO, Toby Steiner, we are incredibly proud to see our community-led platform recognised on this international stage.

This achievement brings our team back to Manchester from 9-11th September 2026, for the annual ALPSP Conference at The Manchester Deansgate Hotel. We are excited to deliver an in-person, lightning showcase during the Awards Finalists session on Wednesday 9th at 4:15PM–5:15PM, before the final winners are announced at the conference dinner on Thursday, Sep 10th.

Hannah Hillen presenting at last year's awards Hannah Hillen presenting Thoth Open Metadata at the 2025 awards

Thoth & OIPA colleagues at last year's ALPSP conference

Fixing the leaky metadata pipeline: an open community solution for open access books

For a long time, the digital book supply chain has been dominated by costly, closed commercial vendors whose systems fail to cater to the specific needs of Open Access (OA) books and chapters. Driven by the foundational research in our scoping reports, we have identified structural inefficiencies and frustrating hurdles that stifle the reach of academic scholarship:

High Costs: Traditional commercial platforms require a big financial investment, which often leaves smaller, scholar-led and university presses managing their data on disconnected, manual spreadsheets.
Lost Data: Book information easily gets cut short when it moves between different systems—such as when rich ONIX files are stripped down to flat KBART formats.
Locked Formats: Metadata from large commercial vendors is frequently locked behind expensive licensing, making it hard for academic libraries to reuse it freely.

At Thoth, we want to make this whole process simple and fair. We built an open, non-profit platform by publishers for publishers. It lets editorial teams input their book details just once into a single, friendly system, which then creates high-quality, open public-domain (CC0) metadata ready for global discovery networks.

The Evolution of Thoth: Relaunching with 1.0

Since our participation in the 2025 innovation awards, the past 12 months have marked a profound transformation for our infrastructure. With the launch of Thoth 1.0 in Apr 2026, we shaped our services into four clear, helpful options tailored to support different publishing workflows:

Thoth Oasis: Our completely free, self-service home for full metadata management and export, open APIs, and smooth connections with tools like PKP's Open Monograph Press (OMP) plugin.
Thoth Obelisk: Our handy distribution service that handles your Crossref DOI updates, file hosting, connects with the OAPEN library and multiple other platforms, and takes care of open archiving with the Internet Archive and Zenodo.
Thoth Sphinx: An advanced setup that uses the OPERAS Metrics service to give you privacy-friendly analytics dashboards and neat book widgets for your web pages.
Thoth Pyramid: A complete web hosting package that gives you a beautiful, white-label publisher website and a fast, responsive catalog using your own domain.

The slides of the presentation given to the 2026 ALPSP Innovation in Publishing Award Board of Judges can be viewed on Zenodo here: https://doi.org/10.5281/zenodo.21725930

Empowering a Growing Community

The real impact of this work can be seen watching our publisher community thrive. Thoth now proudly supports over 110 publishers, helping to manage an open catalogue of more than 4,600 books and 18,500 chapter records. By building international standards—like DOIs, ORCIDs, and ROR IDs—right into our platform, we ensure that a press's size never restricts the global visibility of its scholarship.

As we prepare for the final showcase in Manchester, we want to thank the independent presses, library-led initiatives, and infrastructure partners who stand alongside us in building a fairer, fully open scholarly ecosystem.