Moving beyond closed silos: liberating workflows based on open metadata to bring about an interoperable and open not-for-profit ecosystem for open access books and chapters

(Watch the RECORDING.) Within the context of Open Science, book publishing has traditionally lagged behind in the adoption of open access, open data and corresponding practices. Not-for-profit infrastructures including the Directory of Open Access Books (DOAB), the OAPEN Foundation, Open Book Collective (OBC), the Public Knowledge Project (PKP), and Thoth Open Metadata have joined forces to collaboratively develop open, community-led solutions to the many barriers faced by publishers when considering the creation, discovery, distribution, archiving and financing of open access (OA) books. Our presentation will showcase a variety of innovative open metadata management, hosting, and distribution solutions tailored to tackle the problems of getting OA works into the wider book supply chain. We will show how Thoth enables publishers to create rich, fully open data in industry-standard formats, incl. ONIX (2.1, 3.0, 3.1) MARC21 & KBART for free, encouraging uptake of good metadata practice e.g. by integrating PIDs and controlled vocabularies as well as adhering to recent legislative reporting regulations. The resulting metadata is automatically released into the public domain (CC0), to facilitate easy re-use by e.g. libraries. Publishers can also either use the self-service option to export fully Crossref-compliant XML to directly register DOIs for books and chapters with Crossref themselves, or benefit from a dedicated Sponsorship route (via Thoth) and automated registration workflows that are available through the Thoth Plus service model. Building on that open data, a variety of open dissemination workflows come into view. For example, PKP offers an open source book production and title management system, Open Monograph Press (OMP), which is now being integrated with both Thoth and DOAB/OAPEN to provide robust, free and open metadata management and dissemination workflows for books and chapters. Interoperability between the collaborating infrastructures means publishers can be supported with their website and catalogue hosting needs (by Thoth), with the distribution and archiving of OA book content and metadata to a variety of channels (by Thoth and OAPEN, and including Crossref, the Internet Archive, Portico, and the Thoth Open Archiving Network (TOAN)); have their content and metadata hosted in internationally-recognised discovery solutions (including DOAB & OAPEN); access privacy-respecting usage metrics across multiple platforms (via the OPERAS Metrics service, Thoth, and COKI); and in creating and managing collective funding channels for OA books via the Opening the Future programme and the Open Book Collective – two models supporting presses to transition away from a reliance on unsustainable author-facing fees (BPCs) through collective funding, with OBC also providing a means to financially sustain open infrastructure / service providers via voluntary contributions from supporting libraries. All in all, this close collaboration between like-minded infrastructures – and with some of them (OAPEN & PKP) having existed for more than a decade – constitutes a collective, open, equitable ecosystem of interoperable not-for-profit services and platforms that are jointly active in a variety of international networks and communities, including the Copim community, OPERAS, COMET, the Knowledge Equity Network (KEN), and the Barcelona Declaration group of supporters. Doing so, this dedicated group of infrastructures exemplifies a community- and values-led not-for-profit approach to supporting open access book publishing that is understood to live by the principle of 'Scaling Small' – a concept that "puts forward the idea that scale can be nurtured through intentional collaborations between community-driven pro­jects that promote a bibliodiverse ecosystem while providing resilience through resource sharing and other kinds of collaboration" (Adema & Moore, 2021).