mediastudies.press is thrilled to announce that we have signed on to the new Thoth Plus service, which adds a paid suite of metadata services to the free Thoth offering. A bit of background: Thoth is the open source, open metadata platform that is one of the signal achievements of the first-round COPIM project. Since Thoth was in beta, we have used the service as our ground-truth for our book metadata—which are open and accessible by a pair of powerful APIs.
As part of the Opening the Future second-round funding for Copim (lower-case to designate the community), the good people at Thoth have developed a plan to make the service sustainable in the long run. Their key strategy is to keep the core metadata management free, forever, while charging reasonable, per-book fees for a slew of distribution and other services. (See the full list for Thoth Plus A and Thoth Plus B, our tier, on their pricing site.)
Though we have managed many of these distribution steps ourselves in the past, the combination of streamlining and labor-time savings made the suite of offerings irresistible. And then there are all the distribution points that we haven’t already reached, plus the chance to help support an organization—with some of the best people in scholarly publishing—we deeply believe in.
We’re all in with Thoth. We even hope to use the service as the backend of a new website and, sometime farther off, to power book-level metrics collection and display. More on those soon!
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