MARC Proposal No. 2019-01: Designating Open Access and License Information for Remote Online Resources in the MARC 21 Formats (Network Development and MARC Standards Office, Library of Congress)

"For online publications it is important to know whether a given resource is available “free-to-read,” as it is defined, for instance, in NISO RP-22-2015 "Access and License Indicators" (http://www.niso.org/publications/niso-rp-22-2015-access-and-license-indicators):  “A work that is accessible to read online without charge or authentication (including registration) to any person with access to the internet.”

A designation of “open access” provides similar information, although as the NISO document notes, there are many differing definitions of that phrase. For the purposes of this proposal, the concept of “open access” regarding remote online resources is the one so cogently put forth in the Budapest Open Access Initiative, February 14, 2002 (http://www.budapestopenaccessinitiative.org/read):

[F]ree availability on the public internet, permitting any users to read, download, copy, distribute, print, search, or link to the full texts of these articles, crawl them for indexing, pass them as data to software, or use them for any other lawful purpose, without financial, legal, or technical barriers other than those inseparable from gaining access to the internet itself. The only constraint on reproduction and distribution, and the only role for copyright in this domain, should be to give authors control over the integrity of their work and the right to be properly acknowledged and cited.

After access has been provided, a user should be able to get information on what use rights are associated with the online resource. Creative Commons (https://creativecommons.org/) and Rights Statements (http://rightsstatements.org/en/) are but two of the many initiatives that have created vocabularies for this information.

On behalf of libraries in German speaking countries, the Committee on Data Formats ("Fachgruppe Datenformate") formed a subgroup, the Working Group on Licenses ("Themengruppe Lizenzangaben") in 2016. To improve ways on how to express open access and license information in MARC 21, the Working Group has defined its scope, identified needs, and analyzed existing elements in MARC 21, and is working on best practice recommendations. A liaison to a second Working Group with other metadata standards in scope has also been established.

For this proposal, only information about global, context-free access conditions and restrictions is in scope; that is, the designation that a resource is free to read or available under open access conditions, and is usable and reusable under specific conditions, such as Creative Commons or Rights Statements. License information about a publisher or vendor providing a customer or a group of customers access to a single resource or a package of resources under certain conditions, controlled by different technical means, is not dealt with in this proposal...."