The Andrew W. Mellon Foundation has awarded the National Information Standards Organization (NISO) a grant to support the encoding of a collection of template licences for e-resources into the ONIX for Publications Licenses (ONIX-PL) format. The encodings will be deposited into the GOKb and KB+ knowledgebase for free distribution to the library, publishing and library systems community.
The deposited encodings, made available under a Creative Commons Public Domain (CC-0) licence, will allow libraries that licence electronic content to import the template licences into their own electronic resource management systems for further local customisation to match their negotiated licence and implementation. The project will also fund publicly available training resources that will inform community members on how to use those encodings for their own purposes.
JISC Collections, a division of the UK's Joint Information Systems Committee (JISC) that manages electronic content acquisitions for member institutions of higher learning in the UK, has already encoded all of the licences for JISC Collections-subscribed content and deposited them in its KnowledgeBase Plus (KB+) database.
While KB+ has reportedly proven a useful tool for institutions in the UK, it has not moved beyond this venue because the encodings produced by the JISC Collections are restricted to JISC members' usage. To encourage ONIX-PL adoption and the use of encoded licences, JISC Collections provided additional funding to support the project and provide training in the encoding format and the ONIX-PL Editing software.
According to Todd Carpenter, NISO's Executive Director, NISO has contracted with Selden Lamoureux to obtain the template licences, encode them in ONIX-PL format, and deposit the files in the GOKb and KB+ knowledgebases.
It has been noted that ONIX-PL is elegant but very complex, since it's designed to describe the nuances of licences which are extremely variable.
