JISC

Start date: 1 August 2002

End date: 31 July 2003

Funding programme: Focus on Access to Institutional Resources (FAIR) programme

Project website: http://www.lboro.ac.uk/departments/ls/disresearch/romeo/index.html

JISC theme(s): Information environment

Introduction

The Open Archives Initiative’s Protocol for Metadata Harvest (OAI-PMH) provides a technical framework by which scholarly communication could be revolutionised through the self-archiving (or institutional-archiving) of eprints and other materials. As has been documented many times, and as has always been the case with digital libraries, the barriers to the success of this revolution are not technical but cultural. One of the key cultural barriers to the use of the OAI-PMH for self-archiving is the issue of intellectual property rights.  For authors to self-archive, they need to have retained the right to do so. For authors to retain the right to self-archive they need to ensure they don’t assign that right to publishers. For authors to feel confident about self-archiving, they need to be reassured that their intellectual property will be protected in some way in the OAI environment. For Data Providers to make metadata about their documents freely available, they need to be reassured that their metadata won’t be misused (e.g. harvested and sold).  For Service Providers to harvest and enhance that metadata they need to be sure that they are allowed to do so. And for users to make legitimate use of self-archived works, they need to be informed as to how they may be used. 

There are a wide range of commercial digital rights management systems available. However, they are aimed at enabling e-commerce not protecting “give-away” literature. The Creative Commons are currently developing a set of simple licences and associated metadata to protect give-away literature which may provide one solution for eprint archives. 

Aims and Objectives

Aims:

• Understand stakeholder needs with respect to the protection and use of intellectual property disclosed under the OAI protocol.   This will include the IPR (Intellectual Property Rights) status of the metadata as well as the documents themselves.
• Using existing and developing standards such as the Open Digital Rights Language develop an interoperable set of metadata elements to describe the rights information relevant to “giveaway” literature.
• Develop ways of incorporating the rights elements into the metadata of documents harvested by the OAI metadata harvesting protocol

Objectives:

• A literature search into the rights issues relevant to self-archiving under the OAI-PMH including existing rights metadata models and initiatives, and developing standards with which the project’s work will need to be interoperable;
• An survey of academic authors to identify: their relationship with scholarly publishers; what usage restrictions they would wish to place over their works, and how they would like to be able to use third-party works. ;
• A survey of scholarly publishers to identify: their views on self-archiving; whether their copyright policies allow self-archiving; whether they generate rights or permissions metadata themselves; and how they view the rights status of their metadata.   An analysis of scholarly publishers copyright transfer agreements will also take place.
• A survey of OAI Data Providers to identify: their agreements with authors; any copyright protection afforded the documents they describe; and their views on the rights status of any metadata they create.
• A survey of OAI Service Providers to identify: how they ascertain what uses they can make of harvested metadata and how they view the copyright status of any enhancements they make to that metadata.
• The results of the above four surveys will inform the development of a series of rights metadata elements.
• It will also inform a solution for specifying the uses to which disclosed and enhanced metadata may be put.

Anticipated project outcomes:

• A map of the key rights issues relevant to self-archiving
• A report on the academic author survey: in particular, how academic authors want their protect their self-archived works and make use of others’ self-archived works.
• A report on the publisher survey including an analysis of scholarly publishers copyright policies and their views of self-archiving. 
• A web page providing links and brief descriptions of the content of publishers’ copyright transfer agreements.
• A report on Data Provider requirements for the protection of their metadata and use of rights metadata describing the documents themselves.
• A report on Service Provider requirements for the uses they want to make of harvested metadata and how they want resulting enhanced metadata to be protected.
• A series of rights metadata elements describing how end-users may use “give-away” eprints.
• A means of describing the rights status of metadata disclosed and harvested under the OAI-PMH.

Overall Approach

The project will be organised into three phases:

1. Desk and primary research
2. Development of rights metadata (and rights of metadata) solution
3. Promotion and dissemination activities

Desk and Primary Research

The literature search will make use of traditional A&I services such as LISA, Library Science Abstracts, ZETOC, ArticleFirst, Internet and Personal Computing Abstracts and so on, as well as web searching, informal discussions with stakeholders and postings to relevant email discussion lists. The four surveys will be created online and advertised to both targetted and general audiences.  Results will be analysed in Excel and written up to inform Phase Two.

Development of rights metadata and metadata rights solution. 

The analysis of existing and emerging standards will inform the technical approach to the rights metadata schema design.   Using an existing Digital Rights Language (e.g. ODRL or XrML) metadata elements matching the requirements of academic authors as revealed in the author survey will be created.  They will be advertised widely to the author, Data Provider and Service Provider community to assess their feasibility. The metadata rights solution will be similarly informed by the primary research and developed closely with stakeholders.

Promotion and Dissemination Activities

To ensure the solutions meet the needs of the communities they intend to serve, and to establish how they may be practically implemented, the final phase of the project will involve a series of promotion and dissemination activities.