JISC

ONIX-PL (the ONIX Publications Licence) is intended to support the communication of license terms for electronic resources between licensors and licensees.

The requirement for machine readable usage terms, linked to from electronic reources, was identified in the UK by JISC and in the US, initially, by the Digital Library Federation (DLF) who included the requirement in the Electronic Resource Management Initiative (ERMI). The main difference between the ERMI licensing terms and ONIX-PL is that the ERMI licensing terms are a finite and limited set of terms designed to be entered into ERM systems by libraries whereas ONIX-PL is an attempt to provide a machine readable expression of the complete licence and would normally be supplied to the library by the originator of the licence (typically publisher or consortium).

ONIX-PL has been developed by EDItEUR in collaboration with publishers and libraries, mainly in the UK and US with input from the joint NISO, DLF, EDItEUR, PLS License Expression Working Group, http://niso.kavi.com/apps/group_public/workgroup.php?wg_abbrev=lewg

This group has provided the basis for collaboration between ONIX-PL and the DLF Electronic Resource Management Initiative (ERMI), who have agreed on ONIX-PL as the standard format for the expression of licences. DLF has helped fund development of an ONIX-PL encoding of ERMI terms.

In addition to JISC-funded work on mapping licences to ONIX-PL in the UK with Loughborough and Cranfield Universities and JISC Collections, there is an ongoing USbased pilot involving the Stateside Californian Electronic Library Consortium (SCELC),  Serial Solutions (an electronic resource management systems vendor) and a number of publishers (including Elsevier, Nature Publishing Group, OUP and Springer).

OPLE

It was realised at an early stage that few publishers had staff sufficiently familiar with both licensing and XML to produce ONIX-PL mappings of their licences without the use of a dedicated tool. As a result, with funding from JISC PALS, a functional specification for an ONIX-PL Editing tool, OPLE, was developed and, with the additional support of the Publishers Licensing Society, a prototype version of OPLE was developed.

Although the prototype version has been used by JISC to map NeSLI licences and by EDItEUR to map licences on behalf of Elsevier, Nature Publishing Group, OUP, Springer and Wiley, the user interface and performance is not yet adequate for publishers and library consortia to easily map their licences themselves.

In order to obtain full benefit from ONIX-PL, publishers and library consortia will need to map their own licences and electronic resource management systems in libraries will need to be geared up to receiving them. Serials Solutions are already working on their ONIX-PL implementation and other ERM suppliers are committed to do so. A number of library consortia are planning to receive ONIX-PL licences and the Knowledge Exchange (a European "consortium of consortia") have actually specified that publishers must be "ONIX-PL compliant".

OPLE is also entirely complementary to projects such as RELI that plan to take publisher licences in ONIX-PL format and act as a repository to which libraries without their own ERM systems can link their digital resources.

Lead institution

•  EDItEUR