License Expression Working Group

This group was officially disbanded in August 2008. Its work has been assumed by the joint NISO/EDItEUR ONIX-PL Working Group and a subcommittee of the Business Information Topic Committee that will be surveying re ERMI and the broader ERM landscape.

Charge to the Working Group

The National Information Standards Organization, Digital Library Federation (DLF), EDItEUR, and Publishers Licensing Society (PLS) have agreed to form a License Expression Working Group to develop a single standard for the exchange of license information between publishers and libraries.

The DLF has supported ground-breaking work in this area through its Electronic Resource Management Initiative (ERMI) and EDItEUR has used the ERMI requirements as the foundation of its work in developing its ONIX for Licensing proof of concept model. NISO's May 2005 Digital Rights Expression Workshop identified the need to coordinate and consolidate standards efforts in digital licensing rights expression.

Scope of Work

The working group, co-chaired by Nathan Robertson (University of Maryland Law Library) and Alicia Wise (Publishers Licensing Society, UK), has as its initial charge to:

Monitor and make recommendations regarding the further development of standards relating to electronic resources and license expression, including but not limited to the ERMI and EDItEUR work.
Actively engage in the development of the ONIX license messaging specification.

The technical working group will develop the recommendations based on review and comments. A review group will monitor work in progress and provide feedback to the technical group.

Minutes of WG Meetings

Upcoming Events featuring License Expressions presentations

ALA Midwinter Conference , Philadelphia, PA
License Expression Working Group: Update and Open Discussion
Saturday, January 12th • 8:00 - 10:00 a.m. (location to be confirmed)

Presentations

CNI Meeting, Arlington, VA, April 4, 2006 PowerPoint presentation "Standard Licence Expression" by Christopher McKenzie, John Wiley & Sons, Inc.
CNI Meeting, Arlington, VA, April 4, 2006 PowerPoint presentation "Standard Licence Expression" by Sharon Farb, UCLA, Daviess Menefee, Elsevier Inc., Christopher McKenzie , John Wiley & Sons, Alicia Wise, Publishers Licensing Society
CNI Meeting, Arlington, VA, April 4, 2006 PowerPoint presentation "Standardized License Expression: Clarity, Control and Fair Use" by Sharon Farb, UCLA, Daviess Menefee, Elsevier Inc., Christopher McKenzie , John Wiley & Sons, Alicia Wise, Publishers Licensing Society

Reference Material

ONIX ERMI Encoding Format, November 19, 2007
ONIX ERMI Mapping, November 19, 2007
The ONIX ERMI mapping is a valuable contribution to our license expression work and opens up development pathways between these complementary initiatives.

EDItEUR has built on the ERMI work in developing ONIX for Publication Licenses. ONIX-PL adds depth in the specific area of expressing license terms and conditions, While the ERMI data elements were necessarily broad, ONIX-PL adds richness and structure. This means that more information can be automatically ingested into ERM systems, saving librarians time and effort while improving the data available at the press of a button.

Combined together in an ERM system, the ERMI and ONIX approaches can provide answers to important questions even if the publication license doesn't explicitly address the concept or even if the question has arisen because of evolution in licensing practice. We trust this is a helpful tool to ERM system vendors and other ONIX-PL implementers.
ONIX for Licensing Terms Description
Electronic Expression Workshop Report, Loughborough University, May 22, 2006
ONIX-PL Functional Requirements and Design Specification, July 2006
ONIX for Licensing Terms Publisher Interviews, August 6, 2006
ONIX-PL Status Report, October 20, 2006