Expressing licence terms and conditions of Data Agreements using ONIX-PL
ONIX is a family of standards for communicating rich metadata about books, serials, and other published media, using common data elements. The ONIX standards include ONIX for Books, ONIX for Serials, and ONIX for Licensing Terms. ONIX for Licensing Terms is a format for expressing and communicating licence terms between systems using a standard XML schema.
This project aimed to express the Eduserv Terms and Conditions for Data Agreements (Jan 08) in a machine-readable form using ONIX-PL version 1.0 [PDF], resulting in an ONIX-PL expression of the licence, additions to the ONIX-PL Dictionary, and a report detailing any issues that arose during the work.
The study was funded to improve understanding amongst ourselves and the community of the issues around representing licences in a machine readable format. At this time we are not implementing machine readable licences for our agreements, but if you feel that they would be particularly useful to your institution, we would be interested in hearing from you. Email communications@eduserv.org.uk with your comments.
The final report from this work is publicly available under a Creative Commons Licence.