About us

Thoth Open Metadata is a non-profit open infrastructure dedicated to supporting the scholarly community by providing the seamless integration of open metadata within the book supply chain, ensuring the long-term sustainability and accessibility of the scholarly record.

We are focused on:

• providing high-quality solutions and services for metadata management, dissemination, archiving, usage metrics, and website and catalogue hosting;
• promoting openness in scholarly communications such as open access, open licensing, FLOSS, open data, open metadata, and open standards and protocols;
• embracing infrastructural and platform diversity as an inherent component of a flourishing scholarly communications landscape.

Our Governance

Thoth Open Metadata has been established as a UK Community Interest Company (CIC) limited by guarantee, to ensure that the community’s interest are being met, no private gain (such as paying out dividends to its membership) is sought, and any surplus or assets are used principally for the benefit of the community. Thoth Open Metadata has been formed as a “large membership” CIC, which means that the members have ultimate control over the activities of the CIC. It also requires there to be more members than Directors and allows for the membership to grow as the company grows. These members collectively decide when and how the overall membership will grow.

Another key feature of a Community Interest Company is the Asset Lock, which guarantees transfer of resources to a predefined set of organisations in the case of the CIC facing insolvency. The Membership approves the appointments of Thoth Open Metadata’s Board of Directors, which is responsible for proper management of the company’s business. Directors are held accountable by the company’s wider Membership of stakeholders. With regards to financial transparency, Thoth Open Metadata makes its annual accounts publicly available via Companies House. Any entity from Thoth Open Metadata’s larger community can become a Member of the CIC, and thus actively engage in Thoth’s community governance.

Our Commitment to Openness

We believe in the power of openness and collaboration. All our software is open source, allowing for transparency, community contributions, and continuous improvement. We are committed to fostering an open ecosystem where publishers can freely access and leverage our tools through open APIs, enabling seamless integration with platforms and publisher workflows to meet their specific needs.

All metadata in Thoth are released under an open license, empowering publishers, libraries, and researchers to freely use, share, and build upon the wealth of metadata generated via Thoth. All metadata records generated by the Thoth platform are released under a CC0 public-domain dedication, ensuring maximum flexibility and interoperability.

Thoth is uniquely designed as an open metadata management, distribution, and metrics platform to address the complexities and hurdles involved in integrating open access works into the book supply chain.

Our main goals are:

• lowering the entry barrier to good metadata management and practice for small-to-medium-sized publishers who are currently struggling to produce their metadata to all the various different specifications that each distributing platform requires;
• helping distribute open access books, which have been systematically excluded from a book supply chain that was created for closed books;
• openly exposing upstream high-quality metadata, using industry standards, publicly for anyone to consume.

Thoth Open Metadata’s comprehensive portfolio of services includes metadata management, dissemination, archiving, usage metrics, and website and catalogue hosting, tailored to the needs of open access or hybrid publishers, consortia, and organisations managing open access book catalogues.

No Platform Lock-in

We firmly believe in providing publishers with the freedom to choose their own path. Our commitment to openness ensures that publishers are not locked in to any specific platform or service. Thoth's open architecture and APIs empower publishers to integrate seamlessly with other platforms and workflows, allowing for greater flexibility and adaptability. Thoth Open Metadata enables publishers to retain full control over their data and operations. With Thoth, you're not just accessing a platform – you're joining a community-driven ecosystem built on the principles of openness, collaboration, and interoperability.