Reporting year ending 31 October 2025
Since its inception in 2022, and in compliance with UK regulations, Thoth Open Metadata CIC has published its Annual Report via the UK Companies House registry.
In order to further improve overall transparency of Thoth Open Metadata’s operations, the company’s Directors have decided to extend reporting towards a more comprehensive, community-focused overview of activities that combines standard reporting elements required to meet Companies House regulations with more detailed insights into Thoth’s activities across the financial year. Starting from 2025, Annual Reports will be published on Thoth Open Metadata’s own website as well as the regular submission to UK Companies House.
During the 2025 financial year, Thoth Open Metadata recorded a turnover of £79,135, supplemented by £223,951 in additional income, predominantly from grants and donations. After accounting for the cost of sales, staff expenses, subcontractor costs, and other administrative charges, the organisation reported a net profit of £78,035, a substantial increase compared to £42,119 in the previous year.
Thoth Open Metadata’s balance sheet at year end shows net assets of £131,880 (2023: £53,845). The most significant liability remains deferred income of £107,937, reflecting multi-year funded projects and forward-allocated grants.
These results demonstrate a further improvement of Thoth Open Metadata’s organisational stability, enabling continued investment in the company’s mission to develop and maintain metadata workflows, dissemination infrastructure, and support services for open-access publishers.
During 2025, Thoth Open Metadata has advanced its mission as a non-profit Community Interest Company to support the discoverability and dissemination of open-access scholarly books. Its open infrastructure is designed to reduce the administrative and technical burden on small- and medium-sized publishers by bundling and automating metadata production, management, and distribution, while also offering solutions for streamlined archiving of scholarly long-form outputs, as well as for usage statistics and website and catalogue hosting.
Key areas of impact during the reporting year include:
Operational support for publishers: Almost doubling the number of sign-ups to the Thoth platform, more than 80 publishers now can create and maintain rich, open, reusable metadata of their titles. Small-to-medium-sized publishers benefit from a reduction of duplication of effort, as they are enabled to provide multi-format exports (e.g., MARC, ONIX, KBART) from a single source of truth to a wide range of stakeholders in the open access book supply chain.
Reduction of administrative burden: By providing automated metadata exports, Thoth lowers the overhead associated with meeting platform-specific requirements for multiple distributors, repositories, and knowledge bases.
Strengthening OA participation: Thoth Open Metadata continues its active participation in the Open Book Collective and related initiatives, to support the diversification and financial futures of open access book production and dissemination. In 2025, the relationship with the Open Book Collective (OBC) was extended to include the provision of a state-of-the-art collective catalogue of titles released by OBC publishers. The development of that collective catalogue is ongoing, and will be made available in early 2026.
Contribution to sector-wide initiatives: Thoth Open Metadata holds an active role in the Copim Community and the OPERAS network, contributing infrastructure, research, and practical implementations that benefit the wider OA ecosystem. Further to that, Thoth is an active contributor providing expertise specific to OA books to larger-scale fora such as the Barcelona Declaration on Open Research Information, a sector-wide initiative to foster the uptake of open data sharing, or the Collaborative Metadata Enhancement Taskforce (COMET).
During its 2025 financial year, Thoth Open Metadata expanded its network of integrations and federated services, which in turn directly enhances the impact of its metadata infrastructure:
These developments significantly expand the reach and effectiveness of Thoth’s metadata and services, enabling publishers to distribute open access books more widely and with a substantial reduction of manual effort required.
Thoth’s work on metadata standards research and implementation has deepened in several important ways, and led to further improvements in the platform’s functionalities.
Work conducted during the 2025 financial year include:
Accompanying the standards research and implementation work, the Thoth team have also created a development plan to further improve platform handling and new services. All of this has been distilled into a development roadmap detailing steps towards a full Thoth 1.0 platform release, which the team has been working hard to implement, and with a release date set for Q2/2026.
Collectively, these developments position Thoth firmly as a key facilitator of high-quality, standards-compliant metadata for open access books and chapters that meet or often exceed recognised quality standards for OA monographs.
Thoth Open Metadata’s commitment to bibliodiversity is expressed both through whom it serves and how its infrastructure is designed.
During 2025, Thoth Open Metadata extended its outreach to Latin American as well as Spanish-speaking publishers through presentations and workshop contributions at regional seminars and conferences such as the ABEU Seminar on Academic Publishing (Brazil), the Feria Internacional del Libro (FIL) Lima (Peru), and the Feria Internacional del Libro Universitario (FILUNI) (Mexico).
The feedback collated during those sessions also confirmed the outcomes of a dedicated workshop held earlier in 2024 that included publishers such as Editorial UNRN (Argentina), Editorial FLACSO Ecuador, Editorial UR (Colombia), and EUNED (Costa Rica) and explored regional needs around dissemination and archiving, DOI and ISBN registration, legal deposit requirements, and platform preferences.
Similar workshops and network events were held in the African context together with the African Platform for Open Scholarship (South Africa), and the Nigerian BookHub consortium of partners.
A number of key overlapping needs emerged from these workshops, including:
The feedback collated from these consultations directly informs Thoth Open Metadata’s plans to prioritise the implementation of a multilingual data-model extensions, user interface improvements, and regionally-sensitive pricing of Thoth’s emerging added-value service packages for dissemination, website / catalogue hosting, and usage metrics for OA books and chapters.
Thoth Open Metadata’s outreach activities in Latin America and Africa have largely been made possible thanks to our participation in the Copim Open Book Futures project, which is funded by Arcadia and the Research England Development Fund/UKRI.
During 2025, these were complemented by a host of workshops and presentations Thoth Open Metadata had been invited to in partnership with the Open Book Collective, OAPEN, DOAB, Opening the Future, and the Public Knowledge Project (PKP). The benefits of such a collaborative effort became eminent during a number of international events focused on open infrastructure and diamond OA, including the Diamond OA workshop in Bern, Switzerland, Thoth’s participation in the AEUP Conference in Vienna, Austria, a dedicated collective exhibitor booth at the German Library Congress in Bremen, Thoth’s leading a workshop together with AG Universitätsverlage at Open Access Tage in Konstanz, Germany, and Thoth’s exhibition booth during the 2025 iteration of the Frankfurt Book Fair, which was complemented by an expert contribution to the annual EDItEUR workshop held in parallel to the Fair. Through conference presentations, exhibition booths, and collaborative workshops at these events, our collective engagement provided opportunities to showcase the key role of open metadata in improving the visibility, dissemination, and sustainability of OA books.
Cooperations such as these continue to demonstrate the importance of collaboration between open infrastructures such as Thoth Open Metadata and other community-led initiatives in supporting the discoverability and long-term sustainability of open access books. The Thoth team greatly value these partnerships and look forward to continuing to work together beyond the official conclusion of the Copim Open Book Futures project in April 2026.
Further to that, those workshops and collaboration with regional initiatives, e.g., in the context of the Global Diamond Open Access Summit very much underscored the benefits of collective, community-led approaches to infrastructuring. As another outcome of that advocacy and engagement work, Thoth has been invited to participate as infrastructure partner in several consortial projects, with partners in African, Latin America, Europe, and the UK.
As indicated above, Thoth Open Metadata’s work extends well beyond software development into active community engagement and advocacy for open, community-governed infrastructures. This is reflected in the many activities the Thoth team has been engaged in during 2025, including …
… the organisation of workshops and knowledge exchange: In addition to the workshops mentioned above, members of the Thoth team have been presenting at more than 20 international conferences and events, and published blog posts and documentation to help publishers and libraries understand evolving standards and dissemination practices.
… the creation of open documentation and resources: The Thoth Wiki and associated publications released as part of Thoth’s participation in the Copim Open Book Futures project document the OA books supply chain, platform requirements, and best practices, making specialised metadata knowledge accessible to smaller publishers. This was combined with a webinar organised together with the Open Access Books Network dedicated to knowledge sharing to foster uptake of good metadata practice.
… collaborations with other open infrastructures: Thoth’s direct partnerships with open infrastructures such as PKP and OAPEN demonstrate a commitment to building an interoperable, non-profit ecosystem that keeps control with community-governed entities rather than proprietary vendors. Next to direct collaboration with individual infrastructures, Thoth has also played an instrumental role in establishing exchange fora for open infrastructures active in the open access books publishing space via a dedicated Open Infrastructures Working Group, now part of the dedicated OPERAS Open Access Books Special Interest Group to foster knowledge sharing and information exchange between open infrastructures.
… advocacy for open, interoperable architectures: Thoth’s open-source, open-data stance, including its emphasis on publishers’ independence and avoidance of lock-in, aligns with broader advocacy for open infrastructure, making it easier for libraries and funders to support genuinely open, interoperable solutions. Celebrating the organisation’s focus on open standards and practices, Thoth Open Metadata has recently received a finalist nomination for the ALPSP Award for Innovation in Publishing 2025.
Through these activities, Thoth Open Metadata contributes not only technology but also leadership in shaping a fairer, more inclusive future for open access books.
No changes occurred in Thoth’s governance, directors, controlling persons, legal structure, or national registration during the reporting year. The organisation continues to operate as a company limited by guarantee and a registered Community Interest Company.
Building on the integrations and infrastructure described above, Thoth’s forward-looking priorities include:
Further expansion of dissemination to platforms: Thoth Open Metadata plans to broaden the range of platforms included in its dissemination offering, extending the existing provision of dissemination and archiving towards additional repositories and content aggregators. During 2025, and in close exchange with its community, the organisation has worked to establish links with the UK-based non-profit Royal Institute of Blind People (RNIB) to help streamline book donations to the RNIB Bookshare programme. Next to that, early steps were made to engage with the Amazon marketplace, to enable small publishers to participate in this important ecosystem.
White-label website and catalogue solutions: Thoth Open Metadata has developed a reusable website and catalogue template that directly integrates live Thoth metadata and can be easily reused by publishers and consortia. The company plans to offer this as a hosting solution, enabling publishers and consortia to run their own catalogues and websites while leveraging Thoth’s open metadata. Work is continuing to scope out the provision of an expanded set of services that include the provision of website and catalogue hosting as a dedicated offer, with a service launch estimated for Q2/2026.
Cross-platform usage metrics: Continued engagement with the OPERAS Metrics service has enabled Thoth Open Metadata to develop an open-source dashboard proof-of-concept to visualise cross-platform usage statistics data provided through OPERAS Metrics. In 2025, additional work was put into expanding the proof-of-concept’s functionalities towards a full-fledged offer, which the company plans to add to its service portfolio in 2026.
Traffic Light System as an indicator of metadata quality: Thoth is implementing a Traffic Light System to provide feedback on metadata readiness for multiple downstream platforms (e.g. Google Books, JSTOR, OAPEN/DOAB). This will help publishers quickly identify missing fields required by specific platforms, improving metadata quality and reducing failed exports. An early implementation already flags failing exports and explains missing metadata through the web interface.
Multilingual UX and documentation: Thoth plans to enhance the user experience and documentation with multilingual interfaces and support materials, responding directly to feedback from international and Latin American publishers.
These priorities support Thoth Open Metadata’s overarching goal of offering robust, non-proprietary open infrastructure that enables publishers to keep control of their data while maximising the discoverability and longevity of their valuable outputs to the scholarly record.