06 About
metaafter, beyond; data about data mahala mansion, a palace
A mansion of well-described knowledge: a house with a room for every kind of research object, where each one is described well enough to be found, credited and reused.
A The name
Two words from two languages.
B Why a plan
Eight rooms around a central chamber.
We draw Metamahal as a floor plan of the kind Mughal builders called hasht bihisht, “eight heavens”: a central hall surrounded by eight rooms, as at Humayun’s Tomb in Delhi.3
In our plan each room is a family of research objects. The chamber at the centre is the record they all share, its floor drawn as a jali — the pierced stone screen that lets light through. The openings between rooms are the links we record between objects. The annex in dashed lines is for kinds of objects that have no record type of their own yet: in an architect’s drawing, dashed walls are the ones still to be built.
C How we work
Six rules we hold ourselves to.
Every object deserves a complete record. The identifier is the start, not the finish.
Review fits the object. A dataset is not reviewed like a novel, and a model is not reviewed like a chapter.
Open by default. Open licences for the objects, CC0 for the records.
One object, one identifier. If something already has a DOI, we link to it rather than register another.
Corrections in public. Nothing published is silently changed.
We say what we do not have yet. No invented catalogue, no borrowed credentials, no indexing claims.
D Where we are now
A new house, being fitted out.
Metamahal is new. We have no published titles yet, so there is no catalogue to show and we make no claims about indexing. These are the things that must be in place before our first publication, and where each one stands today:
- The legal owner named on this siteIn place
- The people who manage Metamahal named on this siteIn place
- Membership of Crossref, for books, chapters, reports, proceedings, theses, preprints and reviewsBeing arranged
- Membership of DataCite, for datasets, software, models and audiovisual worksBeing arranged
- A long-term preservation agreementBeing arranged
- An editorial board, published with ORCID iDs and affiliations Apply to join the founding board.Being arranged
E Ownership and management
Who stands behind Metamahal.
- Owner
- Meta Mahal, a partnership firm registered in Telangana, India
- Registered address
- 4-178/30/2, Eshwaripuri Colony, Road No. 5, Nagole, Hyderabad, Telangana 500068, India
- Management
- Aashrith Katakam
Editorial decisions are independent of ownership; see our policies.
F Colophon
How this site is made.
Headings are set in Eczar, designed by Vaibhav Singh and published by Rosetta for Latin and Devanagari together. Text is set in Anek Latin by Ek Type, a collective of type designers in Mumbai; anek means “many”, and the family spans ten scripts. Metadata fields are set in Courier Prime, a new take on IBM’s 1956 Courier, so that every field reads like a line typed on a catalogue card. The Urdu word above is set in Gulzar, a Nasta’liq typeface.
The colours come from the materials of the house:
- Chuna lime plaster
#EEEFE9 - Siyahi ink
#1A1E25 - Neel indigo
#2B3E8C - Kesar saffron
#E5A027 - Sabz garden green
#2F6A53
Every drawing on this site — the plans, the mark, the lattice — is made in code. There are no stock photographs, and no analytics or trackers.