ONIX for Publications Licenses 

As the number of digital resources in library collections grows, libraries have increasing difficulty in managing, and ensuring that they comply with, the ever-growing number of different licenses that they hold.  Libraries need to be able to

• express licenses in a machine-readable format,
• load them into electronic resource management systems,
• link them to digital resources, and
• communicate key usage terms to users

Publishers will also benefit from the ability to maintain their licenses in a standard machine-readable form.

ONIX for Publications Licenses (ONIX-PL) is part of a family of XML formats for the communication of licensing terms under the generic name ONIX for Licensing Terms.  ONIX-PL is specialized to handle the licenses under which libraries and other institutions use digital resources, particularly but by no means exclusively electronic journals.  It builds on the  work of the Digital Libraries Federation's Electronic Resource Management Initiative (ERMI) and the joint EDItEUR / NISO work on ONIX for Serials,and has benefited from funding contributions from the UK Publishers Licensing Society (PLS) and the Joint Information Systems Committee (JISC).

ONIX-PL format, November 2008
ONIX-PL is an XML format for the communication of license terms for digital publications in a structured and substantially encoded form, designed to serve the interests of all parties in the licensing chain. Click on the above heading for more information and downloads.