Job: Metadata & Publisher Outreach Specialist @ Thoth Open Metadata

Key details

• Salary: Between £30,000 and £40,000 per annum, negotiable depending on experience.

• Contract: Full-time, 1.0 FTE, fixed-term

• Start date: Oct 01, 2023 / as soon as possible

• End date: April 30, 2026.

• Location: Fully remote, work from home. Flexibility as to country of residence.

• Application process: rolling, end of play Aug 27, 2023.

Who we are

Developed in the context of the Community-led Open Publication Infrastructures for Monographs (COPIM) project between 2019-23, Thoth Open Metadata is an open metadata management and dissemination platform which has recently been incorporated in the UK as a Community Interest Company (CIC). We are all about embracing infrastructural and platform diversity as an inherent component of a flourishing scholarly communications landscape.

Thoth Open Metadata strives to provide high-quality solutions and services for metadata creation, management, dissemination, archiving and preservation. Our work on Thoth focuses on the creation, curation, and dissemination of enriched and truly open metadata records which we deem essential for the advancement of public knowledge. Our ethos is guided by a variety of approaches to openness in scholarly communications, including open access, open licensing, free and libre open source software (FLOSS), open data, open metadata, and open standards and protocols — all of which is engrained in the outputs created by Thoth.

About the role

Under the remit of the recently-launched Open Book Futures project funded by Research England and Arcadia, we are working to accelerate Thoth’s outreach to publishers.

To help us with facilitating this, we are looking for a motivated Metadata and Outreach Specialist.

In this exciting role, you will act as the main publisher-facing point of contact at Thoth for all metadata-related questions, and work with publishers to ensure careful creation and management of associated book metadata in Thoth.

Doing so, you will support the existing publishers working with the Thoth Open Metadata management and distribution platform and service with regard to e.g. the formatting of book and chapter metadata, backlist ingest, and metadata validation and enhancement, while also supporting the Thoth team with reaching out to prospective publishers interested in using Thoth.

This is a fully remote / working-from-home position, with an understanding that the role holder will be available for five hours per day between 9am and 5pm (UK time) to attend team meetings etc.

Responsibilities

• Onboarding: support publishers in getting set up in the Thoth backend; run checks of pre-existing metadata sets that are to be ingested

• Metadata management & Dissemination:

  • Work with publishers to create and manage enriched book- and chapter-level metadata

  • Interact with publishers to check for missing data, support them with regard to publishing workflows and processes

  • Interact with dissemination platforms to submit publisher data & content

• Outreach: Reach out to prospective publishers & platform dissemination channels

• Additional: Work with the development team to improve Thoth User Interface and workflows

Key skills and experience

👀🔗 Please refer to the job description (PDF) for full details.

We are looking for a candidate with …

• good communication skills to interact effectively with publisher contacts, and an open mind and interest in learning new things

• working experience using Word, Excel, PDFs, and online web interfaces.

• demonstrable work experience in scholarly communications and customer relations / partnerships

• an ability to manage time, work independently and to understand how to prioritise tasks.

• experience with, or a previous background in metadata management, cataloguing, or adjacent fields (Desirable)

• experience in academic publishing (Desirable)

• experience with open access (Desirable)

Application process

Thoth Open Metadata is committed to building diverse teams with people from a range of backgrounds. Equity, inclusion and diversity are core values for us and the communities we support. We welcome applications from members of underrepresented groups and can support family-friendly and flexible working policies on an individual basis.

Applicants are invited to send a cover letter (no more than 3 pages) and CV to Toby Steiner ([email protected]). Also, please don’t hesitate to send any questions you might have regarding this job advert directly to Toby.

We review incoming applications on a rolling basis, and aim to provide an update on your application within 4 weeks of receiving it. However, you may hear from us a lot sooner, so please keep an eye out for an email from us!

Closing date: 11:59pm (BST) on August 27, 2023.

Header image by Risto Kokkonen on Unsplash.