ONIX for licensing terms : Standards for the electronic communication of usage terms

With an increasing number of publications being made available digitally, and new supply chains and business models emerging for trading them, an urgent need has been identified for a standard way of expressing and communicating usage terms, and linking those terms to the publications. Reflecting the development pattern of the markets, this need was first identified in the scholarly journals sector. More recently, a similar requirement has been articulated for the communication of usage terms between publishers' digital repositories and search engines such as Google. EDItEUR, the international trade standards organisation for the book and journals sectors, has been working with stakeholders to develop ONIX for Licensing Terms, a new set of formats that will enable the full range and complexity of licensing terms to be expressed in a structured machine-readable form and communicated between systems using a standard XML schema. This article explains why and how these standards have been developed.