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Vincent W.J. van Gerven Oei edited this page Nov 23, 2023 · 390 revisions
Thoth

The Thoth User Manual, for publishers and other creators of metadata records in Thoth, can be found here.

Data and Metadata

In the digital realm, a Work usually consists of two constituent parts: data and metadata. The data comprise the contents of the publications, the information contained in it targeted at human readers, machine readers, or both. The metadata comprise all the data about the publication, such as its author, title, and subject classification.

Metadata are frequently also part of the Work. For example, the title and author are often mentioned on the opening pages, and the ISBN numbers are usually listed in the colophon. Despite this partial overlap, it is useful to distinguish between data and metadata, as they are handled in distinct manners in the Open Access book supply chain. There are several international Metadata Standards setting baseline quality criteria for metadata.

There are specific digital Data Formats and Metadata Formats that are supported by Thoth. An important subset of metadata is formed by Persistent Identifiers.

Open Access Book Supply Chain

Thoth operates at several level in the Open Access book supply chain. We employ here the categorization of key stakeholders and intermediaries proposed in Michael Clarke and Laura Ricci's 2021 report OA Books Supply Chain Mapping (Clark & Ricci 2021).

Content Funders

Funders

Work records in Thoth allow Content Creators to add information about Funding by referencing an Institution by means of Persistent Identifiers as well as further grant program and project information. Content Funders are able to harvest these data through one of the Thoth Metadata Formats or our Open API.

Libraries

Libraries, both University Libraries and National Libraries, have become increasingly important Content Funders in the OA Book Supply Chain. Thoth is partially funded by library subscriptions through the Open Book Collective and in return Thoth provides high-quality metadata in a range of Metadata Formats including MARC 21. We are working closely with library partners to better integrate Thoth into library cataloguing systems.

Content Creators

Publishers

Thoth is primarily designed as a platform for Content Creators, in particular Open Access Publishers. Thoth provides integrated services for the maintenance, management, and dissemination of metadata records in a wide variety of Metadata Formats to a large selection of Content Platforms, Distributors, and Catalogs & Indices.

Publishers may use one of the available Publishing Platforms, which allow authors, editors, and publishers to collaborate in a digital, in-browser environment. Thoth is currently collaborating collaborating with Open Monograph Press and PubPub to improve integration with their in-platform metadata management functionalities.

Publishing Platforms

Publishing platforms

Authors

Individuals authors are not a targeted user group of Thoth. They may manage their private bibliographic metadata on a one of the available commercial or open source Bibliographic Reference Management Platforms and upload their research directly to one of the Green OA Repositories.

Thoth currently supports the export of metadata to all available Bibliographic Reference Management Platforms via BibTeX.

Content Platforms

Ebook Aggregators

Ebook Aggregators "license and consolidate titles from many publishers into one combined database, [… and] often combine OA and paid-access titles for greater discoverability and convenience" (Clark & Ricci 2021).

Thoth currently supports the export of metadata to Baobab ebooks, EBSCO eBooks, JSTOR, Project MUSE, and ProQuest Ebook Central.

OA Platforms and Repositories

OA Platforms and Repositories "have no underlying infrastructure for the buying and selling of books, and are intended to host exclusively free or OA content" (Clark & Ricci 2021).

Thoth currently supports the export of metadata to OAPEN.

Consumer Ebook Platforms

Consumer Ebook Platforms "offer titles for an individual’s use and access, and do not actively support institutional or library integration" (Clark & Ricci 2021).

Thoth currently supports the export of metadata to Google Play Books.

Shadow Libraries

Shadow Libraries are online databases of readily available content that is normally obscured or otherwise not readily accessible. Such content may be inaccessible for a number of reasons, including the use of paywalls, copyright controls, or other barriers to accessibility placed upon the content by its original owners" (Wikipedia).

Thoth currently does not support export of metadata to any of the shadow libraries.

Ebook Distributors

Ebook Distributors differ from Digital Libraries in the sense that they do not claim to offer a scholarly function, be that to research institutions or to the general public. Distributors repackage and normalize ebook metadata. Most ebook distributors operate some form of monetization scheme, which may not be hospitable to OA books.

Thoth currently supports the export of metadata to OverDrive and RNIB Bookshare.

National Libraries

GLAM libraries

Catalogs and Indices

Platforms that aggregate and host metadata, promoting discovery of particular titles.

Library Management Systems

Catalog management systems for individual libraries.

Knowledge Bases

Library-agnostic, global content indices.

Third-party Content Indices

Publication Database Search Engines / Knowledge Graphs

Search engines built on top of publication databases tailored toward researches. See Jeroen Bosman's excellent Scholarly search engine comparison for useful information regarding availability of publication types, etc. See also the recent comparative study by Visser, Van Eck, and Waltman.

Web-scale Search Engines

Topic-specific bibliographies

Bibliographies managed by scholarly organizations related to a specific field of inquiry.

References and Citations

Citation Indices

Bibliographic Reference Management Platforms

Title Management Platforms

Print Book Distributors

Print Book Distributors allow both authors and publisher to publish print-on-demand hardcopies. They require the manual input of metadata upload of print-ready PDF files without apparent batch or automated upload options.

OER

Open Educational Resources (OER) focus mainly on textbooks rather than scholarly publications.

Digital OER Libraries

Name Governance Membership OA non-OA Ingest
BCcampus OpenEd Public N Y N Push
Merlot Public Y Y N Push
OER Commons Non-Profit Y Y N Push
Open Textbook Library Non-Profit N Y N Push

OER Citation Indexes/Discovery Platforms

Thoth Archiving Network

For open archiving there is an Open Archiving Information System (OAIS) ISO definition.

Existing Preservation Solutions

See also list: https://coptr.digipres.org/Category:Preservation_System

Metadata Schemas

Archiving Formats

Web Archiving Formats

General File Archiving Formats

Image Compression Formats

Molecular Data Archiving Formats

Other Formats

Repository Systems

The Thoth Wiki has been developed in the context of the COPIM (Community-led Open Publication Infrastructures for Monographs) project. Individual contributions to the wiki have been made by Tim Elfenbein, Rupert Gatti, Ross Higman, Brendan O'Connell, Vincent W.J. van Gerven Oei, Tobias Steiner and Hannah Hillen under the general editorship of Van Gerven Oei. All data are available under a CC-BY 4.0 license.

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