Enabling Access By Permission Standards for rights expression

Enabling Access By Permission Standards for rights expression within the ONIX family Brian Green

EDIt. EUR • International umbrella body for book industry standards development - members in 20 countries • Members include book trade standards bodies, trade associations, publishers, booksellers, libraries subscription agents, systems vendors etc. • Develops and maintains open standards for : product information (ONIX), EDI, RFID, Rights expression etc. • Strong collaboration with national and international standards bodies • Manages International ISBN Agency

What is ONIX? • A family of formats for communicating rich metadata about books, serials and other published media, using common data elements • Structured dictionary, code lists, XML Schemas, DTDs and user documentation • Developed and maintained by EDIt. EUR through a growing number of partnerships with other organisations • Extensible, mappable, interoperable • ONIX for Books, Serials, Licensing Terms

ONIX for Licensing Terms (OLT) • A “sub-family” of XML document schemas • Sharing an underlying data model for permissions and prohibitions • Using common data elements and composites • With application-specific dictionaries of controlled values • Applicable to many types of licensor and licensee, many types of licensed content, and many types of usage

OLT: current projects • ONIX for Publications Licenses (ONIX-PL): expressing the licenses agreed between publishers, hosting services, libraries and consortia • ONIX formats for IFRRO (International Federation of Reproduction Rights Organisations): expressing the rights delegated from publishers and authors to an RRO, and communicating between RROs • Also being used as one form of expression for the Automated Content Access Protocol (ACAP) project to express usage permissions for web content in a form that can be interpreted by search engine crawlers and others

Licensing terms - the problem • Growth of digital collections in libraries • Need to automate electronic resource management • Variation in license terms • What are library users permitted to do? • Under what conditions? • Which classes of users are permitted to do what? • What exceptions are there to what they are permitted to do? • Licenses are, typically, negotiated then filed away • How can libraries and users know what rights have been negotiated and avoid saying “no” just in case?

What libraries said they wanted • Expression of rights • all usage rights expressed in machine readable form • Dissemination of rights information • ensuring that whenever a resource is described its associated rights can also be described • Exposure of rights • user sees the rights information associated with a resource Intrallect report for JISC

The solution: ONIX-PL • A standard mechanism for the communication of unambiguous licensing information within the “library supply chain” • Publishers, intermediaries, libraries • Compatible with other metadata standards • XML, ONIX • Expresses complete Publisher/Library license • Including definitions, usage terms, supply terms etc. • For import into library Electronic Resource Management (ERM) System

Not a “Technical Protection Measure” • Other standards (Xr. ML / ODRL) are designed to control rights “enforcement technologies” (i. e. technical protection) • They don’t have the flexibility we need • Libraries and publishers prefer to rely on compliance to licences • Our focus is entirely on the communication of usage terms (rights metadata), not technical protection • Library policies can over-ride message (e. g. fair use)

Benefits for publishers • Helps libraries comply with licensing terms • Precise clarification of usage conditions, prohibitions and conditions • Reinforces trust-based relationships between publishers and their library customers • Libraries and consortia will expect to receive ir • Facilitates publishers’ management of licences • Libraries aren’t the only ones with electronic resource management problems • Enables a knowledge base of licence agreements

ONIX-PL Editing Tools (OPLE) • Most publishers and libraries cannot be expected to draft XML versions of their licences without tools • JISC (UK Higher Education Funding Council) funded specification of a drafting tool to enable publishers to produce ONIX-PL expressions of their licenses, with input from publishers: • Wiley, CUP, OUP, RSM, RSC, Rockefeller UP • JISC and PLS (Publishers Licensing Society) cofunded development of early version of OPLE • Version for general use available June 2008 • Will be open source – freely available to all

JISC Collections: first OPLE user • JISC Collections identified a priority requirement by UK academic libraries for all it’s existing licenses with publishers (around 80) to be available in machine-readable form • They require full representation of the licence with all clauses and usage rights expressed • JISC are using ONIX-PL and the prototype OPLE editing tools to do this

Next steps • U. S. ONIX-PL pilot • Consortium (SCELC) • Publishers (including Springer, OUP, Nature, Elsevier and others to be confirmed) • Systems vendor (Serials Solutions) • Further European pilots • Working with other publishers, libraries and consortia to extend dictionary of terms (never-ending task) • Fully tested ONIX Version 1. 0 and updated OPLE tools by summer 2008

ACAP • Goal: to define ways in which publishers can communicate policies for access and use of online content to search engines and other aggregators and business users • Leadership and funding: • World Association of Newspapers • European Publishing Council • International Publishers Association

Technical Framework… • a toolkit for communicating content access and usage policies • built upon existing standards and technologies • tested in real use cases • initial use cases in news, journal and book publishing

ACAP Version 1. 0 • Extensions to Robots Exclusion Protocol • robots. txt • Reaches parts that robots. txt fails to reach, e. g. : • Both granting permissions and prohibitions • Support for time-based inclusion or exclusion • Dictionary of common terminology for content access and use by search engines • Conversion tool for robots. txt • converts existing robots. txt files to ACAP • available online on the ACAP website

Next steps • Development of ACAP XML format • already drafted • will be tested in syndication use cases • News. ML / NITF • RSS? • Specify formats for embedding ACAP policies in nontext resources • including PDF, images, audio, video, …

What can OLT and ACAP do for you? • For communicating licenses for use of online content to institutional subscribers: ONIX-PL • For communicating policies for use of online content to search engines: ACAP Version 1. 0 • available now (uses OLT semantics) • For communicating usage rights to customers for syndicated content: ACAP XML format • Based on ONIX for Licensing Terms, available 2008

DOI, ONIX and ACAP • ONIX and IDF share the same view of metadata, based on indecs, so DOI-applications can be easily used in ONIX • EDIt. EUR and IDF and agree that data dictionary work should be shared across our communities and have further developed the original indecs project in which both participated. • IDF is a member of ACAP, participates in its technical working group, and is working actively with ACAP on future extensions of the current ACAP project to include redirection mechanisms

EDIt. EUR: ONIX for Licensing Terms http: //www. editeur. org/onix_licensing. html ACAP http: //www. the-acap. org Brian Green brian@bic. org. uk