JISC

Start date: 25 October 2005

End date: 31 March 2006

Funding programme: PALS Metadata and Interoperability programme (phase 2)

JISC theme(s): Information environment

Visit the Metadata and Interoperability pages for an update on this project.

Background  

As the number of the digital resources in library collections grows, libraries have increasing difficulty complying with the widely differing licence terms applied to resources by their creators and publishers. The ability to express these terms in a standard XML format, link them to digital resources and communicate them to users has become a pressing need with benefits to both publishers and libraries, including:

• Increased visibility of usage rights
• Instant answers to questions on terms (e.g. Can I make 20 copies of this article?)
• Easier analysis of licences and their terms
• Savings in administrative time dealing with the above issues
• Increased interoperability between publisher, intermediary and library systems Improved compliance with licences.

EDItEUR, BIC’s international counterpart, is developing standards for the communication of licensing terms, ONIX for Licensing Terms, building on the work of the Digital Libraries Federation's Electronic Resource Management Initiative (ERMI) and the joint EDItEUR/NISO work on ONIX for Serials. An initial ‘proof of concept’ project with funding contributions from the Publishers Licensing Society (PLS) and JISC was completed earlier this year, and a report is available at http://www.editeur.org/licensing/OLT_proofofconceptreport.pdf. 

Aims & Objectives  

This project will take the Wiley InterScience Enhanced Access Licence for Academic Users and develop an equivalent ONIX for Licensing Terms representation in the form of an XML message. As an integral part of the process, publisher and library users will meet to agree the precise semantic meaning of the terms of the licence, to ensure that the electronic version of the licensing terms correctly reflects the intention of the written licence. 

In addition to the production of the XML version of the licence, all the terms expressed will also be mapped to an underlying ontological data dictionary, compatible with the INDECS data dictionary on which the MPEG21 Rights Data Dictionary is based and therefore mappable to that and other similar initiatives. 

Overall Approach  

The approach will be a combination of detailed analysis and semantic mapping of the Wiley InterScience licence and workshop discussion on the semantics of the licence between the publisher and a user library. The InterScience Enhanced Academic Licence was chosen for its wide range of usage terms and widespread acceptance implementation. 

The analysis and mapping of this licence will, in addition to providing a valuable exemplar, create a critical mass of terms. While the ONIX Licensing Terms Dictionary will inevitably require further development, this project will create a significant foundation that should enable publishers to generate their own ONIX for Licensing Terms licences, after registering any new terms they may require with EDItEUR for inclusion in the dictionary of terms. 

In order to achieve the objectives of the project, initial analysis and semantic mapping of the InterScience mapping will be carried out by BIC and Rightscom specialists in collaboration with contracts staff from John Wiley & Sons. 

Following the initial analysis, a workshop meeting will be held with colleagues from John Wiley & Sons and Cranfield University at which specialists from BIC and Rightscom will present their analysis and raise areas of uncertainty or ambiguity with the aim of reaching consensus on the semantics of the licence. 

A final semantic mapping will be drafted, the ONIX for Licensing Terms message and documentation will be developed and the data dictionary extended to include all the terms of the licence. 

A seminar will be held in June, jointly with the related PALS 2 project on Electronic Expression of Licensing Terms: Specifying Publisher Tools and Library Benefits, to present the results of both projects and promote the benefits of ONIX for Licensing Terms to publishers, libraries, intermediaries and potential suppliers of tools and services. 

Key Standards

• ONIX for Books, Version 2.1 available from EDItEUR
• ONIX for Serials, Version 1, available from EDItEUR
• XML 1.0 (third edition), available from W3C http://www.w3.org/TR/REC-xml/
• OWL Web Ontology Language, W3C recommendation 10 February 2004, available from W3C http://www.w3.org/TR/2004/REC-owl-features-20040210/

Project Outputs

• Definitive ONIX for Licensing Terms XML expression of InterScience licence
• Report of workshop on semantics of the licence
• Extended version of ONIX for Licensing Terms dictionary
• Seminar on results and wider implications for the expression of licensing terms.

Outcomes

• The development of a critical mass of licensing terms in the ONIX for Licensing Terms data dictionary that will clearly demonstrate how complex licences can be expressed in a machine readable and actionable format
• The report of the workshop on the semantics of the contract will demonstrate how libraries and publishers can achieve consensus on the precise meaning and implication of licences
• Experience garnered from this project will facilitate mapping of further licensing terms
• The ultimate result of automating the communication of licensing terms will dramatically improve the management of electronic resources in libraries and allow users to have improved access to electronic resources, since libraries will know precisely what their licenses allow and not have to adopt the 'lowest common denominator' approach in allowing access.

Project Extension: Mapping the JISC Model Licences

The project confirmed that the full detail of a publisher-library licence can be expressed in a structured and machine-actionable form as an XML message. It successfully mapped the Wiley licence to the new ONIX-PL format, the ONIX for Licensing Terms format for specifying publisher-library licences, and developed the first cut of the Data Dictionary. This work on mapping licences to the ONIX-PL format was so promising that JISC funded a short project extension.  The extension enabled the project to map the JISC Model Licences to ONIX-PL format.  This will enable JISC to map their individual publisher-library licences to ONIX-PL and make them available to libraries in a standard machine-readable format.

Project Partners

• Book Industry Communication 
• John Wiley & Sons 
• Cranfield University 
• Rightscom