Brian Green, David MartinThe Book Business and International Information StandardsEDItEUR Seminar, Moscow, September 2007

ONIX: where it has come from and where it is going

• Founded 1992 in Amsterdam as a European book trade EDI group

• Sponsored initially by the European federations of publisher, bookseller and library associations

• Now 90 members from 17 countries, including Australia, Canada, Japan, Russia, S Africa, USA

• Interests extending beyond EDI and book supply, to embrace all forms of electronic communication in the book and serials sectors

What is EDItEUR?

• National groups, generally with interests in a particular part of EDItEUR’s work, such as ONIX

• Numbering agencies: ISBN, ISSN, GS1 (formerly EAN International)

• International DOI Foundation (IDF)

• ICEDIS: International Committee on EDI for Serials (managed by EDItEUR)

• IFLA, IPA

• Publishers, booksellers, distributors, systems vendors

EDItEUR partners

• EDIFACT trading message formats

• XML trading message formats

• ONIX product information standards

• ONIX for licensing terms

• Radio Frequency Identification (RFID)

EDItEUR standards

• The Association of American Publishers ONIX (ONline Information eXchange) project began in Autumn 1999, with the aim of providing a standard format for publishers supplying product details, particularly to Internet booksellers

• AAP published ONIX Version 1 Guidelines for Information Exchange in January 2000, based partly on earlier EDItEUR work

• With AAP agreement, EDItEUR published ONIX for Books Release 1.0 in May 2000, and since then has managed all ONIX development

ONIX: the beginning

• No longer just ONIX for Books:

• ONIX for Serials

• ONIX for registering identifiers

• ONIX for Licensing Terms

ONIX today and tomorrow

• A family of XML formats for communicating rich metadata about books, serials and other published media, using common data elements and “composites”

• ONIX comprises XML Schemas, DTDs, code lists and user documentation

• All developed and maintained by EDItEUR through a growing number of partnerships with other organisations

What is ONIX?

• Comprehensive bibliographic detail

• Text: descriptions, reviews, author biographies, extracts

• Images: jackets, thumbnails, author photos

• Audio and video, website links

• Territorial rights

• Prices and availability in different markets

• Promotional campaign information

ONIX for Books

• Release 2.1 revision 03 is the current version

• Development is controlled by an International Steering Committee representing...

• ...fifteen countries in which ONIX has been adopted by the book trade: Australia, Canada, Germany, Finland, France (with French-speaking Canada and Belgium), Italy, Korea, Netherlands (with Flanders), Norway, Russia, Spain, Sweden, UK, US

• Different countries are at different stages of implementation

ONIX for Books

• US: over 150 publishers sending ONIX feeds (October 2006)

• UK: 67 publishers (April 2007)

• Australia: 93 publishers (77% of the industry) (October 2006)

• Canada: 128 publishers (April 2007)

• Norway: about 70% of publishing output in ONIX in 2007

ONIX for Books

• With seven years experience, the time has come for a full review of the standard

• The original requirement was for information about “traditional” books and other physical products – ONIX was designed for a physical supply chain, which still accounts for most publishing revenues

• However, publishers are increasingly producing digital content, and delivering it through different channels

• ONIX must handle digital products as an integral part of the format, not as an afterthought

ONIX for Books

• Sooner or later we need a major new Release 3.0 of ONIX for Books, not only embracing digital content but also making many other improvements

• Currently, the Steering Committee is reviewing whether to move straight to this new release, or whether to make less extensive changes in a Release 2.2, to allow more time to work out the longer-term requirements

• A decision is expected at the Frankfurt Book Fair in October

ONIX for Books 3.0

• An EDItEUR – NISO collaboration through a Joint Working Party (JWP)

• Three applications to date

• Serials Online Holdings (SOH): a format for communication between “publication access management systems” and libraries, to deliver details of the electronic holdings to which the library has access, and to populate resolution servers

• SOH Release 1.0 is published and in use: Release 1.1 is being prepared

ONIX for Serials

• Serials Products and Subscriptions (SPS):(a) Communication of journal product catalogue information through the supply chain from publisher to subscription agent to library(b) Communication of details of subscriptions held by an individual library or a consortium

• SPS Release 0.91 is available on the EDItEUR website: implementation is starting

• An extended Release 0.92 is being prepared

ONIX for Serials

• Serials Release Notification (SRN)

• A journal issue and article level format to be used for communicating details of printed or electronic content as it is released: two versions, one at issue level, the other at article level

• Release 0.91 of the issue-level message is published on the EDItEUR website

• A first release of the article-level message is being prepared

ONIX for Serials

• Standard identifiers (such as ISBN) need to be associated with at least a minimum set of metadata describing the thing that is identified

• This principle is recognised in all recent work on identifier standards in ISO and elsewhere

• ONIX subsets can readily be defined as carriers for identifier registration metadata

ONIX for ID registration

• DOI: a set of ONIX DOI registration formats has been developed, for serial and non-serial items, as works or as products, all available on the EDItEUR website

• ISBN-13: the new standard defines a minimum metadata requirement for ISBN agencies. An ONIX format and schema for ISBN-13 registration has been specified

• ISTC is expected to follow shortly

ONIX for ID registration

• Growth of digital collections in libraries

• Need to automate management of digital resources

• Need to relate licences to institutional policies

• Variation in licensing terms

• Complexity of licence documentation

• Uncertainty at the point of use

• How could publishers and vendors help?

Licensing terms – the problem

• Express licence terms in machine-readable form

• Communicate electronically from vendor to subscriber

• Enable licence terms to be loaded directly into a subscriber’s computer system

• But this needs a standard...

Deliver licence terms digitally

• Some work on the encoding of licence terms was done as part of the US Electronic Resources Management Initiative (ERMI) in 2004, but this fell short of enabling a licence to be fully expressed

• EDItEUR undertook a proof of concept project in 2005, supported by the Publishers Licensing Society and JISC

• Followed by the publication of a first draft of an ONIX format for Publications Licences

ONIX for Licensing Terms (OLT)

• OLT is a family of licence-related formats with a shared underlying framework

• A data model for describing licensing “events”

• All terms defined in a structured OLT Dictionary that will grow as new application needs are identified

• Individual formats specified – with appropriate levels of specialization – as separate XML schemas and documentation

The OLT framework

• ONIX for Publications Licenses (ONIX-PL) for communicating electronic expressions of publisher/library licences

• ONIX for Repertoire, and ONIX for Distributions Message formats for the International Federation of Reproduction Rights Organizations (IFRRO)

• The Automated Content Access Protocol (ACAP) project is using OLT semantics to express permissions for use of web content in a form that can be interpreted by search engine crawlers

• Others to come

OLT applications

• The common thread running through ONIX developments:

• ONIX Books 3.0 – enabling digital products to be described alongside traditional publications

• ONIX for Serials – driven by the need for better management of electronic journal collections

• ONIX for DOI registration – supporting the Digital Object Identifier

• ONIX for Licensing Terms – enabling compliance with licence permissions for digital content

The digital future...

• www.editeur.org

• Brian Green: brian@bic.org.uk

• David Martin: david@polecat.dircon.co.uk

• Francis Cave: francis@franciscave.com

EDItEUR contacts