Other sources for canonical license URIs?

[Klortho]

Right now, in the Permissions recommendations, we're basically saying that only CC URIs are appropriate. But this might not be accurate, especially regarding supplementary files, including data and code. I know of two other groups that, I believe, are committed to defining stable URIs for licenses:

• opendatacommons.org,
• GNU, see, e.g., http://www.gnu.org/copyleft/fdl.html

So, do we want to change the recommendations?

[Melissa37]

Has anyone heard of this: ONIX for Publications Licenses (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. 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 Library Federation's Electronic Resource Management Initiative (ERMI) and joint EDItEUR/NISO work, first on ONIX for Serials and later on ONIX-PL itself; and it has benefited from funding contributions from the Publishers Licensing Society (PLS) and the Joint Information Systems Committee (JISC).

http://www.editeur.org/21/ONIX-PL/

[Klortho]

I'd seen that and forgotten about it. We referenced that and a couple of other license standardization efforts in our "Inconsistent XML" paper, here

[hubgit]

There's also the SPDX License List, which provides a URL for each license and an identifier to use in package description files such as npm's package.json. Some of those are marked as being approved by the OSI, who maintain a list of approved licenses.

[ostephens]

There is some Mellon funded work to encode licences for e-journals and other online licences as ONIX-PL http://www.niso.org/news/pr/view?item_key=d7c2845ca0f154a458ca734fda4cea01f22e8e1e

The resulting encodings are being deposited in a platform called 'GOKb' (Global Open Knowledgebase) [disclosure: I work on this project]. There are currently 13 licences from major journal publishers available on through this work (https://gokb.kuali.org/gokb/search/index?qbe=g%3ALicenses&det=&offset=0). You need to create an account on the GOKb system to access these (see https://gokb.kuali.org/gokb/). Each licence hosted on the GOKb system has it's own URL

Editeur - the organisation who manage the ONIX-PL standard - have also published an ONIX-PL encoding for CC-BY 3.0 at http://www.editeur.org/141/CC-BY-3.0/

In the UK Jisc (http://www.jisc.ac.uk) is very interested in machine readable licensing and I've got contacts at Jisc, Editeur and GOKb if any of this is of interest and further conversations are desirable.

[Melissa37]

I wonder whether we could include all of these in the list and if the uri/url provided in the License tag is not one, then produce a warning? Then we could have an open issue where interested parties add new ones to add to our exclusion criteria? I know people are against too many warnings in the Schematron, but this is fundamental to Daniel's criteria for JATS4R! If a bot cannot detect it is open for reuse, there is nowhere to go?