Category Archives: oa.thoth

Automated archiving: a case study | Community-led Open Publication Infrastructures for Monographs (COPIM)

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by Ross Higman

In a previous post, I summarised initial investigations by COPIM’s archiving and preservation team into the possibilities for automated archiving. This followed on from earlier experiments with manual workflows, which highlighted the prohibitive time investment that would be necessary for small and scholar-led publishers to manage archiving in this way. Due to the rich and well-structured nature of metadata within Thoth, and the options available for integrating the Thoth software with archiving platforms, we concluded that a basic level of automated ingest would be both worthwhile and eminently achievable. Three months later, we obtained proof of concept with a bulk upload of over 600 Thoth works to the Internet Archive.

This blog post will explore the steps taken to accomplish this, providing pointers for anyone looking into implementing a similar system themselves, as well as giving some background for publishers interested in joining the Thoth programme to take advantage of this feature. All code used in the process is available on GitHub under an open-source licence, as is standard for the COPIM project. The post will also outline our plans for building on this initial work as we start to develop the Thoth Archiving Network.

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Thoth Archiving Network Workshop, November 2022 | Community-led Open Publication Infrastructures for Monographs (COPIM)

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by Miranda Barnes

COPIM Work Package 7’s Thoth Archiving Network workshop was held virtually on Tuesday, 2nd November 2022.  Around 30 participants attended, and we thank all of you who participated and provided feedback.

Work Package 7 Lead Gareth Cole began the workshop with a presentation, updating attendees on the activities of the COPIM Project, including Opening the Future (Work Package 3), the Open Book Collective (Work Package 4), and the Thoth metadata management system (Work Package 5), Experimental Publishing (Work Package 6), and of course, Archiving & Preservation (Work Package 7). 

Gareth explained the overall values and goals of the COPIM Project and introduced the core objectives and activities of each work package. This led into the important discussion of the proposed Thoth Archiving Network, a collaboration between Work Packages 5 and 7, to create a simple dissemination system for small publishers to archive their monographs in a network of participating institutional repositories. Proof-of-concept has been developed and tested, and several universities have already agreed to take part.  

Small and scholar-led presses make up much of the “long tail” of publishers without an active preservation policy in place, putting their significant contributions to the scholarly record at risk. While large-scale publishers have existing agreements with digital preservation archives, such as CLOCKSS and Portico, the small press often languishes without financial or institutional support, alongside challenges in technical expertise and staff resource. The Thoth Archiving Network would not solve every issue, but it would be an initial step towards essential community infrastructure, allowing for presses to use a push-button deposit option to archive their publications in multiple repository locations. This would create an opportunity to safeguard against the complete loss of their catalogue should they cease to operate. 

For the second half of the workshop session, the attendees and COPIM colleagues were divided into three breakout rooms. The same two questions were posed for each group: ‘Would you be interested in joining the Thoth Archiving Network?’ and ‘What are the potential barriers for you joining the Thoth Archiving Network?’. 

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Open Book Collective now live!

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We are thrilled to announce the launch today of the Open Book Collective! Visit our site to see our members such as Open Book Publishers, the Directory of Open Acccess Books (DOAB), OAPEN, punctum books, mediastudies.press, meson press, Mattering Press, African Minds, and Thoth.

Librarians can see Open Access initiatives, presses & open infrastructure projects, that can be supported via annual memberships that will help these groups to thrive & also contribute to a fund to assist these groups in further developing & bettering their operations.

Supporting members of the OBC contribute to a more durable ecosystem for the long-term sustainability of OA publishers & open infrastructure developers so critical to Bibliodiversity.

Open Book Collective has been developed by the COPIM project and ScholarLed, generously funded by the Research England Development Fund and Arcadia, a charitable fund of Lisbet Rausing and Peter Baldwin (grant number 4192).

Visit our website here: http://openbookcollective.org and send any questions or comments to us at: info@openbookcollective.org

 

Experimenting with repository workflows for archiving: Automated ingest | Community-led Open Publication Infrastructures for Monographs (COPIM)

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by Ross Higman

In a recent post, my colleague Miranda Barnes outlined the challenges of archiving and preservation for small and scholar-led open access publishers, and described the process of manually uploading books to the Loughborough University institutional repository. The conclusion of this manual ingest experiment was that while university repositories offer a potential route for open access archiving of publisher output, the manual workflow is prohibitively time- and resource-intensive, particularly for small and scholar-led presses who are often stretched in these respects.

Fortunately, many institutional repositories provide routes for uploading files and metadata which allow for the process to be automated, as an alternative to the standard web browser user interface. Different repositories offer different routes, but a large proportion of them are based on the same technologies. By experimenting with a handful of repositories, we were therefore able to investigate workflows which should also be applicable to a much broader spread of institutions.

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Recording: Thoth’s GraphQL API Workshop | Open Book Collective @ YouTube

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As Thoth continues to enable presses to manage metadata for their open access books and export it in a number of different formats to various platforms, catalogues and other dissemination channels, we want to make sure all its users are fully aware of Thoth’s open API capabilities. Led by Thoth’s software engineer Javier Arias, the team of COPIM’s Work Package 5 will guide users through its GraphQL API and demo how to query the API, write queries, and export the resulting data into a spreadsheet. Ultimately, this workshop aims to familiarize non-technical users who would like to learn how to directly retrieve data from Thoth’s API with Thoth’s versatile capabilities. Event details can be found here: https://www.copim.ac.uk/outputs/event… Learn more about Thoth at https://thoth.pub/

Thoth GraphQL API Workshop, August 19, 2022 | Community-led Open Publication Infrastructures for Monographs (COPIM)

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COPIM (Community-Led Open Publishing Infrastructures for Monographs) is a 3.5-year project funded by Research England and Arcadia, that will develop and build the critical underlying modular components to support the sustainable publication of open access (OA) books, including infrastructures, business models, governance procedures, re-use strategies, preservation structures, and outreach programs. These systems and infrastructures will be open and collectively managed for the common good. Towards this end, COPIM aims to develop a significantly enriched not-for-profit and open source ecosystem for OA book publishing that will support and sustain a diversity of publishing initiatives and models, particularly in humanities and social sciences publishing.

One of COPIM’s outputs includes the development of Thoth, an open metadata manager and dissemination system and service designed specifically for Open Access books. Its source code is open, its data is exposed via open APIs, and all its outputs are released under a CC-0 license allowing for publishers, archivists and distributors to increase their metadata outputs as well as for libraries and platforms to easily gather or transfer book metadata.

Workshop aims:

As Thoth continues to enable presses to manage metadata for their open access books and export it in a number of different formats to various platforms, catalogues and other dissemination channels, we want to make sure all its users are fully aware of Thoth’s open API capabilities. Led by Thoth’s software engineer Javier Arias, the team of COPIM’s Work Package 5 will guide users through its GraphQL API and demo how to query the API, write queries, and export the resulting data into a spreadsheet. Ultimately, this workshop aims to familiarize non-technical users who would like to learn how to directly retrieve data from Thoth’s API with Thoth’s versatile capabilities.

 

The Open Book Collective and Beyond: Community-Led Infrastructures for Open Access Books | Zenodo

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Eve, Martin Paul, Deville, Joe, Gatti, Rupert, & Barnes, Miranda. (2022, June 15). The Open Book Collective and Beyond: Community-Led Infrastructures for Open Access Books. SCURL Annual Conference 2022 (SCURLconf22), online. Zenodo. https://doi.org/10.5281/zenodo.6644949

With this session, the COPIM project will present ongoing work centring on the Open Book Collective, which we hope will be an exciting and useful collective for libraries to participate in – a collective that not only aims to support OA Book publishers and infrastructures, but to create a community that works together to develop and support non-profit OA book publishing.

Presentations will introduce the Open Book Collective Platform – the platform under development in COPIM’s Work Package 2 that will facilitate collective library funding for OA book publishers and infrastructure providers, while also acting as an information hub around all things OA book publishing.

We will also be presenting on the various collective funding models being adopted – including
a. Opening the Future (COPIM Work Package 3), and
b.  Pure OA models (eg OBP, punctum & ScholarLed)
which may be of interest for libraries considering funding such initiatives, but also for new initiatives that may wish to join the OBC and seek collective funding.

The third presentation will focus more closely on Thoth, the metadata manager and dissemination service being developed in COPIM’s Work Package 5. Designed specifically for small publishers that wish to effectively disseminate their metadata and content – including for the creation of online websites and catalogues for publishers. This may be attractive to libraries looking to establish new publishing initiatives with the university, with the Scottish University Press and Edinburgh Diamond being two good examples. It would also be interesting to address how libraries may wish to access the database for ingesting OA book metadata into their own systems.

This will be followed by a presentation on the Archiving and Preservation network currently being conceived under the remit of COPIM’s Work Package 7. Working alongside Thoth, the aim is to create processes and a network of university repositories to effectively archive and preserve more complex OA books created by small non-profit initiatives.

 

Guest post: A milestone for the open access book: 50,000 open access books in DOAB and counting | OASPA

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A milestone for open access – the Directory of Open Access Books now includes over 50,000 open access books published in 90 languages by 560 academic book publishers. The directory, representing scholarship from authors and publishers around the globe, is openly available to the scholarly community and the general public at large.

 

Thoth, open metadata and building structural equity: an interview for Open Access Week | Community-led Open Publication Infrastructures for Monographs (COPIM)

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An interview with our software developer Javier Arias, about our open dissemination system Thoth

The theme for Open Access Week 2021 is ‘It matters how we open knowledge: building structural equity’. Here at COPIM we spend a lot of time thinking about equitable ways to support Open Access book publishing, so, to mark the occasion, we bring you an interview with our software developer Javier Arias reflecting on a key piece of infrastructure we are building: our open dissemination system, Thoth.

New Thoth Releases and WP5 Updates | Community-led Open Publication Infrastructures for Monographs ( COPIM)

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van Gerven Oei, V. W. J., Gatti, R., & Arias, J. (2021). New Thoth Releases and WP5 Updates. COPIM. https://doi.org/10.21428/785a6451.cfab5944 van Gerven Oei, V. W. J., Gatti, R., & Arias, J. (2021). New Thoth Releases and WP5 Updates. COPIM. https://doi.org/10.21428/785a6451.cfab5944van Gerven Oei, V. W. J., Gatti, R., & Arias, J. (2021). New Thoth Releases and WP5 Updates. COPIM. https://doi.org/10.21428/785a6451.cfab5944

See what’s new in the development of Thoth, our Open Metadata Management System! Thoth is an open, community-owned and governed system designed for the curation & sharing of open metadata for Open Access books

Thoth, open metadata and building structural equity: an interview for Open Access Week | Community-led Open Publication Infrastructures for Monographs (COPIM)

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The theme for Open Access Week 2021 is ‘It matters how we open knowledge: building structural equity’. Here at COPIM we spend a lot of time thinking about equitable ways to support Open Access book publishing, so, to mark the occasion, we bring you an interview with our software developer Javier Arias reflecting on a key piece of infrastructure we are building: our open dissemination system, Thoth.

Download Thoth Metadata Records Directly from the punctum Website · punctum books

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n another important step in the development of metadata management system Thoth, created in the context of the COPIM project, we are now able to generate full ONIX 3.0 and CSV metadata records of punctum books’s catalog.

Thanks to the development of a new Metadata Export API by Javier Arias and Ross Higman, we now have stable URLs that will allow any reader or supporting library to access punctum books’s CC0-licensed metadata. Currently the only two available formats are ONIX 3.0 and CSV, but in the coming months we also hope to add MARCXML, KBART, and several other formats. You can read more about our prioritorization of metadata formats in the COPIM blogpost from February.

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punctum books Signs Metadata2020 Pledge | punctum books

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punctum books has signed the Metadata2020 metadata pledge. By signing the pledge, punctum books promises to be “an advocate for richer, connected, and reusable open metadata.”

Over the last few months, punctum has already acted upon this promise by making its metadata openly available under a CC-0 licence through open metadata dissemination platform Thoth, which it is currently beta-testing. You can read more about the development of Thoth by the COPIM project here and here.

The Holy Grail does not exist: OPERAS-P and OASPA’s workshops for publishers on innovative business models for books – OAPEN – supporting the transition to open access for academic books

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By Agata Morka & Tom Mosterd

In May 2021, together with the Open Access Scholarly Publishing Association (OASPA), OPERAS hosted a series of three European workshops on business models for open access books targeted specifically at small and medium-sized academic book publishers1. As part of the OPERAS-P project work package 6 (Innovation) OPERAS was looking into innovative, non-BPC business models. The feedback gathered in the course of these three workshops informed a report The Future of scholarly communications, published at the end of June 2021 as an OPERAS-P project deliverable.

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