We revisit the webinar recently organised by the Open Access Book Network (OABN, the Open Institutional Publishing Association (OIPA), and Thoth Open Metadata.
On March 20, Thoth Open Metadata were delighted to take part in a webinar jointly organised by the Open Access Books Network (OABN) and the Open Institutional Publishing Association (OIPA).
This free webinar offered practical guidance and a forum for sharing good metadata practice for Open Access (OA) books. Featuring a panel of expert speakers, it aimed to help publishers, librarians and other stakeholders in the OA landscape understand this vital piece of the publishing process for OA books: why metadata matters, and how to create and use it most effectively.
Over 180 attendees joined on the day and the full recording is available on Youtube:
Good metadata practice for open access books: webinar
The webinar kicked off with Lucy Barnes (Senior Editor and Outreach Coordinator, Open Book Publishers; OABN) and Paula Kennedy (Head of Publishing, University of London Press; Co-Vice Chair, OIPA) giving introductions on their respective networks.
The OABN is an open network and space for passionate conversations about OA books. Researchers, publishers, librarians, research funders, infrastructure providers, and anyone interested within the OA community, can engage in discussions, events and find helpful materials via the network. The OABN are also a Working Group within the Open Access Books Special Interest Group (SIG) of OPERAS.
OIPA is a new community of practice supporting OA publishing within UK institutions. The group was founded to connect and encourage OA publishing within the UK. Their mission is to create a new source of support and advocacy for established and emerging university presses and institutionally-affiliated publishing operations striving for open access.
Three fifteen-minute talks were then given by the panel of speakers, including Graham Bell (Executive Director, EDItEUR), Jeff Edmunds (Digital Access Coordinator, Penn State Libraries), and Hannah Hillen (Metadata & Publisher Outreach, Thoth Open Metadata) and Tobias Steiner (COO, Thoth Open Metadata).
ONIX for Books
The first speaker was Graham Bell of EDItEUR, a not-for-profit membership organisation that develops, supports and promotes metadata and identification standards for the global book, ebook, audio and serials supply chains. Acknowledged as a centre of expertise on standards and metadata for the industry, it is best known for ONIX for Books, the Thema subject category scheme and EDItX e-commerce messages.
The ONIX for Books product information format is the international standard for representing and communicating book industry product information - metadata - in electronic form. Ahead of the workshop, Graham circulated this helpful brief introduction to ONIX.
Fig. 1: Full slidedeck available at: Bell, G. (2025, March 20). Open Access products in ONIX. Good Metadata Practice webinar, online. Zenodo. https://doi.org/10.5281/zenodo.15168235
During the session, Graham broke down the XML-based standard for rich book metadata, covered the differences between ONIX for OA and commercial books, and the remaining issues with ONIX and OA.
Metadata and open access
The second speaker was Jeff Edmunds of Penn State University Libraries, where he manages access to the Libraries’ millions of digital resources. He specialises in leveraging metadata to improve the visibility and discoverability of OA ebooks. Jeff provided an insightful look into OA metadata in relation to libraries’ use of MARC, the international standard for the capture and exchange of bibliographic metadata. Metadata for OA books originates with publishers, who generally use ONIX, but to be useful for libraries, ONIX data needs to be transformed into MARC records which are then loaded into library discovery systems to facilitate search and retrieval of OA materials. Jeff highlighted what librarians consider to be good metadata, what happens to the metadata once it reaches libraries, and how libraries and publishers can work together to make OA books discoverable in library catalogues.
Fig. 2: Full slidedeck available at Edmunds, J. (2025, March 20). Metadata and Open Access. Good Metadata Practice webinar, online. Zenodo. https://doi.org/10.5281/zenodo.15168326
We also think it is worth plugging this informative blog piece Jeff wrote for the OABN on Open Metadata and Libraries and efforts (including platforms like Thoth!) to build an infrastructure for the creation, maintenance, curation, and sharing of metadata in alignment with the principles of Open Access: that metadata should be open access itself (i.e. both free of cost and freely reusable without any restrictions).
Metadata, standards and platforms for open access books: good metadata practice with Thoth
The third talk was put together by Hannah Hillen and Tobias Steiner of Thoth Open Metadata, the non-profit, open metadata management and dissemination platform. Following on from the specific focus on ONIX and MARC as two of the key metadata formats in use in book publishing, Hannah spoke about what the team at Thoth has been able to learn about good metadata practice in our work with a variety of publishers of scholarly books; and the journey that metadata takes as it flows through the global book supply chain.
Fig. 3: Full slidedeck of our talk “Metadata, standards and platforms for open access books: good metadata practice with Thoth” available at: https://doi.org/10.5281/zenodo.15048076
We demonstrated the importance of metadata as a tool for communicating the scholarly record, covering metadata elements for organising and describing content; metadata for provenance and ownership information; metadata to evidence the integrity of the scholarly record; and metadata specific to open access books and chapters. We highlighted the use of well-structured, consistent metadata that uses open metadata standards and persistent identifiers to enhance publisher workflows; and how effective metadata is crucial to facilitate book discovery, access and use.
We talked about the metadata lifecycle and how continuous curation takes place, beginning at authorship, moving through book production, publication release, distribution to multiple discovery channels and integration into a diverse range of systems. We highlighted the challenge of effectively sharing book metadata across the entire book supply chain and how integration of open metadata management into book production workflows, library cataloguing systems, and long-term preservation solutions, is gaining importance and urgency.
Fig. 4: This schematic showcases the metadata workflow of a collection of small and scholar-led publishers through the use of Thoth. The diagram shows how metadata is ingested into Thoth, managed, and exported to a variety of content aggregators and metadata indexes including OAPEN, DOAB and JSTOR; how DOIs get auto-registered with Crossref for books and chapters; and how publications are archived in open repositories such as the Internet Archive and Zenodo. https://doi.org/10.5281/zenodo.13960036
Good practice takeaways
Compiled from all three talks, here’s our key takeaways for what makes good OA book metadata:
should be made available as early as possible in the research and publication process
accurately describes the item
precisely contextualises the item
unambiguously identifies the entities associated with the item
adopt metadata standards, persistent identifiers, and controlled vocabularies
makes the Open Access status explicit
includes explicit licensing information
includes a stable link to the item (e.g. a DOI)
includes pointers to landing page and files (e.g. full-text PDF, epub)
is itself open (ideally released under a CC0 dedication to maximise reusability1)
How can Thoth help with OA metadata management?
Thoth offers comprehensive solutions to streamline metadata workflows and improve the discoverability and accessibility of scholarly books. Our software is open source, tailor-made for Open Access book and chapter metadata, and the multiple output formats and specifications for more than a dozen platforms are all released under a CC0 dedication, allowing for maximum reuse and interoperability.
Thoth empowers publishers and users to generate structured metadata records according to various industry specifications and adhering to good metadata practice, ensuring compatibility and interoperability across different systems and platforms. Using open industry standards, including ONIX 2.1, ONIX 3.0 & 3.1, MARC, KBART, JSON, CSV, BibTeX, and Crossref XML DOI deposit records, Thoth provides the flexibility needed to meet diverse publishing requirements. overall enhancing discoverability of a publisher’s scholarly ouput.
And with a direct integration of Persistent Identifiers (PIDs) such as ORCID for authors, ROR for institutions (incl. funders), and controlled vocabularies such as BISAC and Thema, Thoth ensures that publishers have the tools to efficiently manage and share metadata in formats that suit their publishing needs, enabling them to meet good metadata practice recommendations such as those defined by the Working Group of German University Publishers (AG Universitätsverlage, 2023).
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