Thoth Obelisk
Built on top of the management services under Thoth Oasis, Thoth Obelisk provides a portfolio of automated distribution and archiving solutions tailored to the needs of open access publishers, ensuring your publications reach a wider audience with ease, and are kept safe for future generations.
Obelisk in a nutshell
Includes everything in Thoth Oasis, plus:
- Thoth file hosting via CDN under the publisher’s own domain;
- Crossref membership and automated DOI deposits included:
- Streamlined ebook distribution to multiple aggregators, with no additional fees* involved; metadata distribution to multiple indices;
- Permanent ebook archiving via Thoth’s open archiving workflows.
Automated Distribution
Automated distribution with Thoth Obelisk streamlines the dissemination of your publications to multiple platforms and aggregators, allowing you to focus on producing quality content while we handle the logistics of reaching a wider audience.
More details on Thoth Open Metadata’s automated distribution workflows can be found in our dedicated Distribution service page).
Crossref membership
Thoth Open Metadata's Crossref Sponsorship provides significant benefits to individual publishers seeking Crossref membership.
Publishers subscribing to Thoth Obelisk qualifying for Crossref's lowest two membership tiers can sign up for Crossref membership directly through Thoth, with waived annual membership fees, per-DOI costs covered by Thoth Open Metadata***, and a fully automated DOI registration workflow available at their fingertips via the Thoth interface.
For more information on Crossref sponsorship, see Crossref's Working with a Sponsor page. Sponsored members can also sign up to Crossref's additional services such as Crossmark (➡ see Integrations) and Similarity Check through Thoth Open Metadata.
Thoth Open Metadata’s agreement with Crossref also highlights the underlying ethos of what we are looking to achieve with Thoth: we are putting in the legwork of making organisational and technical connections with distributors so that publishers don’t have to. This also includes ensuring that publishers do not have to sign up to services that will subsequently lock them in to perpetual dependencies – including Thoth! In the context of Thoth’s Crossref Sponsorship, publishers are able to register for (or to keep) their individual publisher-specific DOI prefix (the initial 5-digit part of a DOI). In so doing, we explicitly refrain from locking publishers in to a platform-specific DOI prefix, and thus support publishers keeping their infrastructural independence.
A more detailed discussion of why we believe this to be relevant is available in this recent blog post:
van Gerven Oei, V. W. J., Steiner, T., Hillen, H., & Higman, R. (2025). Maybe Persistent but Certainly Not Unique: On the Proliferation of DOIs in Open Access Book Publishing. Copim. https://doi.org/10.21428/785a6451.fb6181fd
OAPEN & DOAB membership
Thoth Obelisk also includes OAPEN membership through our collaboration agreement with OAPEN and DOAB. With this framework agreement, Thoth acts on behalf of the group of publishers subsumed under the umbrella of the Thoth OAPEN Publishing Collective and provides a streamlined way of submitting books to the OAPEN and DOAB catalogues on behalf of those participating publishers.
Individual publishers participating in the Thoth OAPEN Publishing Collective will benefit from a streamlined automated upload process, and publishers’ individual per-book fees will be waived as part of that agreement.
Thanks to Thoth Open Metadata’s role as a core member in the DOAB Trusted Platform Network, publishers using Thoth’s added-value services for their dissemination can ask for guidance to verify which of their open access books meet the DOAB criteria, and verified titles can then automatically be listed in DOAB, facilitated through Thoth’s automated dissemination workflows.
* excl. Project MUSE, for which a 50% discount on the standard fee has been negotiated.
** As of Q3/2025, JSTOR has halted uptake of new OA publishers, with no further update available.
*** Fair-use policy applies.