We’re delighted that Thoth Open Metadata has been selected as a finalist for the 2026 ALPSP Award for Innovation in Publishing. 

It’s particularly exciting to return to the ALPSP Awards this year because a great deal has changed at Thoth over the past twelve months. In April, we launched Thoth 1.0, bringing together the different strands of our work into an expanded suite of services for publishers. At the same time, the principle at the heart of Thoth remains unchanged: making it easier for publishers to create high-quality open metadata and use it to get their books discovered, accessed and preserved. 

Tell us about your organisation 

Thoth Open Metadata is a UK-registered non-profit Community Interest Company (CIC) building open infrastructure for scholarly books. 

Thoth grew out of the Community-led Open Publication Infrastructures for Monographs (COPIM) project, alongside partners from across scholarly publishing and the wider open-access community. 

Our starting point was a problem familiar to many book publishers. Producing a book is only part of the job: publishers also need to make sure information about it reaches libraries, aggregators, discovery services, repositories and countless other systems. Each can require different metadata formats and specifications, creating considerable work for publishers with limited staff and technical resources. 

We believe publishers should instead be able to manage their metadata once and use it widely. And crucially, that metadata should remain open, interoperable and under their control. 

What did you submit for the Award? 

The launch of Thoth 1.0 in April marked an important milestone for us. Thoth now brings together four interconnected services: 

Thoth Oasis is our completely free metadata management platform, where publishers can create rich book- and chapter-level metadata and generate outputs in numerous industry-standard formats. All metadata is made available under a CC0 dedication and through our open APIs. 

Thoth Obelisk takes that metadata further, providing managed dissemination and preservation services. These include DOI registration, distribution to platforms and indexes throughout the global book supply chain, file hosting and open archiving. 

Thoth Sphinx provides privacy-respecting usage insights, helping publishers understand how their OA books and chapters are being used across multiple platforms. 

Finally, Thoth Pyramid uses publishers’ metadata to power customisable websites and online catalogues. 

Together, they reflect something we have been working towards since Thoth began: an open publishing infrastructure in which high-quality metadata becomes the foundation for a much wider range of services. 

How does it work – and who is behind it? 

Interoperability is fundamental to Thoth. Publishers maintain their metadata within one structured system, and Thoth transforms that information into the different formats required throughout the scholarly communications and book supply chains. 

Through our dissemination services, that can mean sending books and metadata to platforms such as OAPEN, JSTOR, Project MUSE, EBSCO and ProQuest; registering book and chapter DOIs through Crossref; supporting discovery through indexes and knowledge bases; and preserving publications through the Internet Archive and Zenodo. 

Just as importantly, we don’t want Thoth to become another silo. Our open APIs enable other infrastructures and publishing platforms to build connections with Thoth, and our software itself is open source. 

The team behind Thoth brings together expertise in scholarly publishing, metadata, software development and open infrastructure. But the wider community is an equally important part of what we do. We work closely with publishers, libraries and other open infrastructures, and our non-profit, membership-based CIC structure places community-led governance at the heart of the organisation. 

What makes Thoth innovative? 

For us, innovation isn’t only about introducing new technology. It can also mean changing the assumptions around how scholarly infrastructure should work. 

Many of the systems that underpin the book supply chain remain proprietary. Metadata can become locked within particular platforms, difficult to reuse, or costly to create and distribute. For smaller, scholar-led, university and library publishers in particular, navigating this environment can consume time and resources that are already scarce. 

Thoth takes a deliberately different approach. 

Our software is open source. Our metadata is CC0. Our APIs are open. Publishers retain control of their data and can export and reuse it elsewhere without being locked into Thoth. 

Our organisational and business models are part of that innovation too. As a non-profit, community-owned infrastructure, we are interested not simply in what technology can do, but in how it can support a more equitable and bibliodiverse scholarly publishing ecosystem. 

This approach is increasingly being put into practice at scale. Today, more than 110 publishers use Thoth, and our open catalogue contains more than 4,600 books and 18,500 chapters, representing publishers from a wide range of regions and publishing contexts. 

That growing community is important to us. Open infrastructure only really succeeds when it connects people and systems rather than trying to replace them. 

What comes next? 

Launching Thoth 1.0 was a milestone, rather than a finishing point. 

Over the coming years, we want to make it even easier for publishers to participate in the global book supply chain while retaining control of their metadata and publications. That means further automating distribution, helping publishers improve metadata quality, expanding the platforms represented within Thoth Sphinx, and developing new services such as OAI-PMH, support for legal deposit and ISBN registration. 

We also want to continue strengthening relationships with libraries. More than 30 academic libraries already support Thoth through the Open Book Collective, helping us provide services to publishers operating in regions where the cost of participating in international scholarly publishing systems can otherwise be a significant barrier. 

Ultimately, though, our ambition is quite simple: better metadata should help good books travel further. 

By keeping that metadata open, connecting rather than duplicating infrastructure, and building services around the needs of the communities that use them, we hope Thoth can contribute to a scholarly book ecosystem that is more open, discoverable and sustainable for everyone. 

---

About the author 

Hannah Hillen is Metadata & Publisher Outreach Specialist at Thoth Open Metadata. She works closely with publishers to support their use of the Thoth platform and services and develops partnerships and dissemination channels between Thoth and platforms throughout the global book supply chain. 

Hannah has an MA in Librarianship and a 15-year background in cataloguing, archiving and preservation of print and digital material in academic libraries and special collections. 

Links 

Thoth Open Metadata: https://thoth.pub/

Thoth 1.0: https://doi.org/10.70950/gfsb5419

Thoth's 2026 ALPSP Award announcement: https://doi.org/10.70950/rtnk6247

Hannah Hillen – ORCID: https://orcid.org/0009-0004-9521-0445