Communicating Licensing Terms:breaking the implementation

impasse A workshop for UKSG 2010

Mark Bide – Executive Director, EDItEUR

…or which comes first?

London-based global trade standards organization for books and serials supply chains Established 1991 Not-for-profit membership organization

ONIX family of communications standards ONIX for Books ONIX for Serials

(online subscription products including ebooks) ONIX for Licensing Terms

EDI RFID Manage the International ISBN Agency

About EDItEUR

ONIX family principles XML

Common approach to encoding, validation Designed for global application

Permissive, open structures Able to cover a wide range of use cases and to be adaptable to local

use without compromising the core structures Encourage localised and appropriate profiling for specific

applications Reuse of key structures and semantics within and between

message families Common composites Shared code values

Separate message structure from code values Easy update of code lists while maintaining backwards compatibility Only when absolutely necessary (new “major release” like ONIX for

Books 3.0) is backwards compatibility lost

A very short introduction to ONIX-PL

ONIX-PL: the problem …there is a desire on the part of users of

resources…to be compliant with terms established by rightsholders…the need for users to know what permissions attach to the access and use of any particular resource becomes increasingly pressing due to considerable differentiation between license terms…It is difficult or impossible for users to discover for themselves the terms that apply to a particular resource…

With licenses typically available only on paper (or its digital equivalent), reference to license terms is labour intensive and slow

ERMS only part of the solution – how do you populate the data?

ONIX-PL: (part of) the solution? …lies in the establishment of mechanisms by

which key elements of licenses can be made available so that a user can be provided with the most significant elements of license information at the point of use – those that relate to permitted access and use. This needs to happen without additional human intervention; those significant license terms must be machine interpretable.

ONIX-PL: the headlines ONIX for Publications Licences (ONIX-PL) an open message

standard for expressing publisher-library licences in XML using an extensible dictionary of terms v1.0 published on the EDItEUR website A second issue of the Code Lists will be published in the next few

months ERM systems will allow users to link from e-resources to user-

friendly understandable usage terms Librarians can view complete licence and interpret terms OPLE – an open source authoring/editing tool, jointly funded by

JISC and PLS to help publishers map their licences to ONIX-PL and libraries to add interpretation or map licenses

RELI Project – a pilot project to demonstrate the function of a licence registry

Although semantics specific to the publisher/library supply chain, the conceptual framework should be applicable to any licence

9

12

13

RELI – ONIX-PL in action

“Registry of Electronic Licences”A JISC funded project led by the University of

Loughborough

RELI: identifying user requirements1. Making license terms available to end-users is important

2. Some form of symbolic representation of what is permitted and what is forbidden, but that only key usage terms

3. Interpreting licenses presents many problems, particularly if the meaning of clauses is obscure. In these cases most librarians tend to err on the side of caution and do not allow users to make any use of a resource if they are not completely clear about its legitimacy.

4. Librarians can find it difficult to present the clauses within the license in a meaningful way without expert unpicking of the “legal jargon”.

5. Librarians indicated that integrating a license registry with existing library management systems would be desirable, but that it should function without relying on other library management systems.

6. Publishers would like to be able to offer one broad general license, but this was not possible due to differing conditions on the sale of journals. Publishers, however, did indicate that they would be willing to create machine-readable licenses when it can be shown that there is a demand for them.

The challenge of identity – license to resource

Digital Resource 1

Paper licence

Create machine-interpretable

version of relevant elements of

licence

Licence B

Licence A

Licence Management

Repertoire Management

Licence BResource 5Resource 6Resource 7

Licence AResource 1Resource 2Resource 3Resource 4

Digital Resource 4

Establish relationship

Identify repertoire to which Resource

belongs

Digital Resource 2

Digital Resource 3

Digital Resource 4

Establish relationships

Digital Resource Management

The challenge of identity – license to resource to user

Digital Resource 1

Licence B

Licence A

Licence Management

Repertoire Management

Licence BResource 5Resource 6Resource 7

Licence AResource 1Resource 2Resource 3Resource 4

Digital Resource 2

Digital Resource 3

Digital Resource 4

Digital Resource Management

User

1. User queries which licence terms relate to a particular Digital Resource

2. System establishes to which Repertoire the Digital Resource belongs for this User

3. System establishes which licence relates to which repertoire

4. System provides appropriate licence terms to User in human readable form

High level overview of process

User

1. HTTP Request for Resource

RELI Repository

5. HTTP request - URLcontains DOI

Resolves compound query of Institutional Identifier & DOI

to identify Licence

Publisher Resource

Repository

Print a copy Include in a digital course pack

Use for document delivery

Email a copy to someone else

If you are a student

If you are a lecturer

If you are a librarian

Print a copy Include in a digital course pack

Use for document delivery

Email a copy to someone else

If you are a student

If you are a lecturer

If you are a librarian

Login provides Institution Identifier

2. HTML response(includingDOI in META tag)

Demonstrator scenario:RELI returns visual display using browser

plug-in query

3. Browser plug-in parsespage, sees DOI and injects RELI

popup code into page

6. Graphic

7. User sees publisher page and popup graphic

4. User clicks RELI icon

The user view of RELI

The user view of RELI

RELI Conclusions Expressing licenses in XML is a considerable discipline for

publishers and everyone else in the chain There is a steep learning curve for everyone

Expressing licenses in XML does not overcome licensing disagreements Indeed, in the short term, the opposite may be true Removing ambiguity is sometimes seen as a

disadvantage…. There are substantial challenges in identification

Of resource, licenses and users A license registry can be useful to an institution in a number

of ways, as well as providing permissions data for users Storing all licenses in one place for access by library staff Enabling comparisons of licenses

…but which comes first?

RELI’s conclusion? Only libraries can create the context in which

ONIX-PL (or something like it) will get market traction Demand for systems able to ingest and interpret

XML expressions …and demand for the expressions themselves

ONIX-PL: 2010

Where do we stand in 2010? Approved JISC project: JISC Collections Licence

Comparison and Analysis Tool Create ONIX PL expressions of about 80 of the most

licensed resources in the JISC Collections portfolio Make licence expressions available to UK academic

institutions for loading into ERMS Create a web interface to allow view of individual licences,

multiple licences at the same time, or to compare the terms of specific licences

SURF – active interest in implementation Particularly relating to complex objects in institutional

repositories

…but the reality remains While when we present ONIX-PL, we find an

enthusiastic audience… …and major ERM vendors have committed to

implementation… … none has yet implemented Publishers have indicated that they would be

willing to express licences in ONIX-PL… …“When there is demand from our

customers”… …although it can be a problem to identify who

in the publishing house has the responsibility to make the decision to move this forward

The questions I want to explore with you today Is this a problem that needs to be solved, or do

we have a solution in search of a requirement? Where would the most significant advantages lie in

implementing ONIX-PL? Who gains? Does anyone lose? How can we solve the problem of the real costs of

implementation? Who should be creating the XML expressions?

Are there other, better ways of solving the same problems?

If ONIX-PL is useful, how can we push implementation forward more effectively? Where should we be putting our efforts?

Thank you

mark@editeur.org