NISO’s Access License and Indicators (ALI) Recommended Practice, published in 2015, aims to standardize and communicate bibliographic metadata describing the access rights status and license details for journal articles. It has been widely adopted, including in the JATS vocabulary and Crossref’s metadata schema.
Following the 2019 adoption of the EU Directive on Copyright in the Digital Single Market, there is now a need to extend ALI to include metadata and indicators that allow metadata users, such as content platforms, to filter or target subsets of license information. This would enable these applications to determine which versions of a journal article – or elements of it – can be shared, and under which circumstances (for example, in researcher collaboration groups or on public profiles).
NISO Voting Members have recently approved a proposal to make these changes, and a NISO Working Group is being set up to take this forward, including selected members of the STM STEC subgroup on Article 17, with the goal of having a Trial for Pilot User available in early 2021. Volunteers are invited from across the information community — publishers, metadata service providers, content platform providers, and other interested parties — to review and update the existing recommended practice per the scope described above. Please see Creating NISO Standards for information about the process, and contact NISO Associate Executive Director, Nettie Lagace at nlagace@niso.org, if you’re interested in participating.
