JISC

Start date: 1 January 2006

End date: 31 July 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  

The project will promote the benefits of electronic expression of licensing terms, examine the difficulties that not-for profit and smaller publishers, including learned societies, might have in generating an XML version of their library licences and show how tools and services could be developed to support them.

The project will work with smaller publishers to agree the benefits to them of mapping their licences to the XML ONIX for Licensing Terms format and specify the tools and services required to enable this. 

In addition to the analysis of publishers’ requirements and the specification of tools and services, a significant benefit of the project will be the raising of awareness among smaller publishers of work on standards for the electronic communication of licensing terms. The project will provide an opportunity for them to identify and input specific requirements that might otherwise be overlooked, especially (but not exclusively) those that relate to the generation of ONIX for Licensing Terms versions of their licences. 

The specification of the tools and services required to help publishers to manage licence term information and to generate licences will enable existing software and service providers to build tools and services as modules of integrated systems, as stand-alone tools or by providing third party services. 

At the user end, the project will consider some of the potential uses of the ONIX for Licensing Terms messages in a receiving academic institution and will examine how the XML licensing messages can help users by enabling library systems to provide clearer and more immediate information about usage rights for specific digital resources. 

Objectives are to:

• Increase awareness in both publishers and libraries of benefits of electronic expression of licensing terms
• Improve understanding of the issues faced by smaller and not-for-profit publishers in generating ONIX for Licensing Terms XML versions of them
• Specify the tools and services required to facilitate XML expression of licences
• Evaluate of the benefits of electronic expression of licensing terms to academic libraries
• Report on how the XML message can best be used to provide these benefits using stand-alone or integrated library systems.

Overall Approach  

The initial step will be preparation and distribution of briefing materials for publishers on ONIX for Licensing Terms and the benefits of communicating licences electronically. These will be published as an ALPSP ‘Advice Note’ as well as being made available on the BIC web site and promoted via the Publishers Association, BIC and other trade newsletters. 

This will be followed by a series of visits and interviews with publishers to establish the obstacles to publishers producing XML versions of their library licences and the tools and services that they would like to have available to help them achieve this. 

Drawing on this material, BIC’s consultants will draft an initial specification of tools and services for presentation to publishers and potential service suppliers at a workshop organised jointly by ALPSP and BIC at which publisher participating in the survey will have the opportunity of discussing the draft specification with potential providers of tools and services, following which a final specification will be produced and circulated. 

A separate workshop will be held at Loughborough University to consider the benefits to libraries of ONIX for Licensing terms and to consider potential applications and interfaces with current systems as well as tools needed by libraries to convert their existing paper contracts into ONIX for Licensing Terms. Issues such as the level of granularity required in the electronic licences and whether there will remain a need for paper versions of the contracts will also be addressed. Ideas floated at the workshop will be followed up with research and a report. 

Feedback from the workshops will provide input to a final report specifying requirements for tools and services and a public seminar in June for publisher, intermediaries, libraries and their systems vendors. 

Key Standards

• ONIX for Books 2.1
• ONIX for Serials 1
• XML 1.0 (third edition)

Project Outputs

• An article on the potential benefits of ONIX for Licensing Terms aimed at smaller and medium publishers for publication as an ALPSP ‘Advice Note’ and elsewhere
• Report on interviews with publishers
• Specification of tools and services
• Report on workshop on publisher tools and services
• Report on results of workshop on library uses and interfaces evaluating the benefits of electronic expression of licensing terms to academic libraries and how the ONIX for Licensing Terms message can best be used to provide these benefits using stand-alone or integrated library systems

Project Outcomes

• Greater publisher awareness of the benefits of ONIX for Licensing terms to the whole supply chain for electronic resources
• Understanding of the potential barriers for publishers in providing machine readable XML-based licences for libraries
• Agreed specification of tools and services that would help publishers to produce these XML licences and, hopefully, lead to provision of such tools and services by third parties
• Provision of a framework to help publishers better organise their licence management systems
• Greater understanding of the various library applications that machine readable licences can enable
• Better management of electronic resources in libraries and improved access to electronic resources for users.

Project Extension: Developing the Tools

The project demonstrated that there would be benefits for both publishers and libraries in having licences expressed in a standard machine-actionable form. There was considerable interest in tools that would facilitate the mapping of licences to the new ONIX-PL format, and the project developed a specification for such tools. JISC, the Publishers Licensing Society, and EDItEUR subsequently funded a short project extension to develop the tools.  OPLE, the ONIX-PL Editor, is the fully functional prototype tool available from SourceForge.

Project Partners

• Book Industry Communication 
• Association of Learned and Professional Society Publishers (ALPSP) 
• Loughborough University