From: Owen Stephens <[log in to unmask]>
Date: Thu, 2 Apr 2015 13:16:53 +0100


On 2 Apr 2015, at 00:54, LIBLICENSE <[log in to unmask]> wrote:

>Ann Okerson wrote:

> (3) Language of the contract.  This is tough.  The great majority of
> e-resources licenses are written in English, and nearly all the rest
> in other primary western languages.  Now, this poses a real challenge
> for people whose primary language is NOT one of those languages, or
> who are not fluent in same -- which is the case for many in our world.
> This puts people in non-Western countries in a difficult (to
> impossible) situation.  The terms of use they're being asked to agree
> to (or wish to negotiate) may be poorly understood. Many western
> publishers have in-country agents to deal with local librarians, but
> those agents are not so likely to take time to "educate" their
> customers in the nuances of the publishers' contracts, even if the
>agents understand them (which they may not).
>
> What can we do about #3, which is a crucial issue?  Are there any
> publishers who have experience of working in an array of foreign
> languages regarding e-resources contracts?  How do you do it?  Would
> like to hear from you, please.


The use of ONIX-PL for to mark up licences may offer a solution here.
In two projects I'm working on (GOKb [1] and KBPlus [2]) we use the
ONIX-PL xml to produce a 'human readable' version of the licence. This
is following the example of OPLE software [3] which is used to both
mark up the licences and produce readable versions from the resulting
XML.

The OPLE, GOKb and KB+ versions of 'human readable' are slightly
different because they've taken slightly different approaches, but
they all essentially end up with a series of statements where terms
from the encoded licenses are joined together with some standard
English phrases. For example:

------------------------------------------------------------
What you may do:
    As Licensee
        * Access Licensed Content from LicenseeSite for Academic Use

        * Supply Copy of Licensed Content Part by Hard Copy Supply to
Third Party Non Commercial Library

        * Include Link To Licensed Content in Licensee Content
(Condition: Access By Authorized Users Only)
------------------------------------------------------------

This text is a mixture of terms defined by ONIX-PL dictionary
transformed into English language terms (e.g. 'Access', 'Licensed',
'Academic Use') and joining words in English (in italics -  'from',
'of', 'in' etc.). The former are defined in the ONIX-PL dictionary
file:

"onixPL:AcademicUse" = "Use for the purpose of education, teaching,
private study and/or academic research."

This is transformed into "Academic Use" and linked to the full
definition when displayed in GOKb/KB+/OPLE etc.

If someone were to provide appropriate translations of the ONIX-PL
dictionary definitions and offer appropriate phrases in place of the
English language terms, then it would be easy to render the same
original licence (presumably in English) into other languages in a
standard way. Once the ONIX-PL work had been done for a language, then
all licences made available with an ONIX-PL version could be displayed
in the same way.

It would be an interesting project to work on and I suspect the
Editeur team who maintain the ONIX-PL standard would be interested. It
would also link nicely to the NISO ONIX-PL Encoding project [4].

Best wishes,

Owen

[1] https://www.kbplus.ac.uk/kbplus/
[2] https://gokb.kuali.org
[3] http://www.editeur.org/22/ople-software/
[4] http://www.niso.org/workrooms/onixpl-encoding/