Open Access Week Interview with Hannah Hillen

The Copim team talks with Hannah Hillen about her experience joining Thoth as a Metadata & Publisher Outreach Specialist.

Tell us a little bit about yourself! When did you join the Copim community? How’s your experience been at your position?

I’m new to the Copim community, joining only this October. I’ll be working with the Thoth team as Metadata & Publisher Outreach Specialist; the main publisher-facing point of contact and working with publishers to create and manage enriched and truly open book metadata in the Thoth platform. I’m excited to be on board with Copim’s community-led publication ethos, and Thoth’s approach to building a platform that reflects and forwards the values of open infrastructure.

How do you interpret the theme "Community over Commercialisation" in the context of Open Access Week 2023 and your work, and why is it important for the field of open scholarship?

“Community over Commercialisation” is demonstrated through the openness of Thoth’s source code, metadata records, and focus on open access books. The project is steered not only toward the flourishing of scholar-led publishers but to the growth of a healthier scholarly communication ecology, more directly managed by the scholarly community and guarded against platform lock-in. Thoth aims to level the playing field between large and small publishers in the scholarly book market, by alleviating some of the difficulties faced by scholar-led presses. The approach makes it easier for publishers to create and manage metadata for their titles; encourages publisher workflow practices that lead to complete and high quality metadata; creates a metadata record only once which can then be exported in many formats and shared openly under a CC-0 license; and Thoth take on the legwork of navigating the scholarly book supply chain.