Transcript Competitor Survey

Standard License Expression
CNI Meeting
Arlington, VA
April 4, 2006
Christopher McKenzie
John Wiley & Sons, Inc.
The problem: Confusion
Libraries manage myriad electronic resources and struggle
with managing what who can do with which resources.
Contributing to this are variations in:
• Licensors and their contractual terms and conditions
• Copyright laws
– where the end-user is located
– where an intermediary (e.g. library or aggregator) is located
– where the resource is published and/or located
• Contract law in all of the above places
• Varied resource types (even among the same content provider,
e.g. journals and books)
Possible responses
•
•
•
•
•
•
Get rid of copyright
Get rid of contracts
Modify copyright legislation
Educate library staff and users
Agree on a single model license
Promote collective licensing to reduce number of license variations
(e.g. consortial licensing)
• Use technology to manage the complexity
– Digital Rights Management (DRM)
– Rights Expression Languages
– Standards for rights and licenses + content (e.g. ONIX for
Licensing)
Strategic issues
Publishers understand the issue and there are a lot of
possible responses, each having various implications, but
any effort:
• Will require investment to better manage rights information
• Will require coherent licensing/rights/use policies within publishing
organizations
• Should lead to coherence across publishing organizations (but
recognizing that strict laws regulate what competitors can and can
not share)
Practical issues
While publishers see this effort as an opportunity to work
together to clarify “rules of the road,” to be successful it
should:
• Use a standard, automated approach to keep costs down for all
• Use standards based on those already embedded in workflows
(e.g. ONIX, DOIs)
• Reflect the needs of all parties
Wiley’s role
Why does Wiley support a standard XML expression for
licensing terms?
• Publishers want to help libraries understand the terms of the
licenses they negotiate
• If it helps librarians (e.g. by having terms displayed and
conditions clarified), it helps us since libraries are our customers
• It helps libraries know and comply with terms
• It may promote usage by clearly delineating authorized rights
• It helps improve our own license terms
• It maintains flexibility and avoids the “LCD” approach
Wiley and ONIX
Why does Wiley support this specific approach? (i.e. ONIX for
Licensing Terms)
• ONIX has become accepted as the de facto standard in publishing
for the transmission of product data
• Actionable ONIX terms can be held within XML records; nonactionable terms (i.e. those that are too complicated to encode)
can be linked to from the XML expression. Payment details, for
example, are likely to be held in a separate file.
• ONIX should stand a better than average chance of being
accepted by the community
• Project involvement helps us influence the standard. We have a
lot of respect for the other project partners and the project
management team (Cranfield; RightsCom; EDItEUR).
Pilot Results and Next Steps
• Wiley provided the project team with a sample license – its
Enhanced Access License for academic customers.
• We participated in a workshop with the project partners and
management team in January. Purpose was to agree the meaning
of the terms of the license, and ensure that the electronic version
of the licensing terms correctly reflects the intention of the written
license. (Very successful, but our complexity was laid bare…)
• Next key date is in July for a half-day seminar.
• BIC also working with ALPSP specifically to look at the issues for
smaller publishers