PLS > Services & Benefits > Industry Standards

Rights Services

ACAP
ACAP provides a standard framework that allows publishers to express access and use policies in a language that internet search robots can understand. ACAP has the ambition for a much broader scope, communicating licences and permissions at machine-to-machine level in other business relationships and other media types including music and audiovisual materials. Importantly, a controlled vocabulary underpins ACAP.

ARROW
ARROW stands for ‘Accessible Registries of Rights Information and Orphan Works’ and it is a project funded under the European Commission’s eContentplus Programme. Project partners include a broad range of European national libraries, publishers and collective management organisations. ARROW aims in particular to develop ways to clarify the rights status of orphan and out of print works, so they can be cleared for digitisation and inclusion in digital library initiatives. The project also seeks to enhance the interoperability of rights information between rights holders, agents, libraries and users. Solutions envisaged by the venture include the establishment of systems for the exchange of information about the rights status of works, the creation of a registry of orphan works and a network of rights clearance centres. Key to achieving this objective the project partners recognise is interoperability, standards deployment and stakeholder involvement.

Attributor
Attributor is a company that provides content tracking tools that can be used by publishers to detect piracy. It is promoted as a revenue generation tool because one strategy for stopping piracy is to licence the use of content by piracy sites.

ONIX for Licensing Terms

The ONIX family consists family of standards has long underpinned the automated communication of physical books to all involved in the supply chain. The family has expanded recently with new messages to communicate about serials, and especially relevant here, messages for communicating about licences, repertoires, rights, and royalties. There are two particularly relevant ONIX messages. ONIX-PL is intended to support the licensing of electronic resources – such as online journals and ebooks – to academic and corporate libraries. It was developed in recognition that as the number of digital resources in library collections grows, libraries have increasing difficulty in managing, and ensuring compliance with, the correspondingly growing number of different licences that they hold. Reproduction Rights Organisations (RROs) are the agencies which manage the licensing of rights in printed and other media. EDItEUR (the organisation that develops and maintains the ONIX message family) is working with IFRRO (International Federation of Reproduction Rights Organisations) and its member agencies to develop, maintain and support a set of ONIX message formats for communicating licences and royalty payments.

PLUS
The PLUS Coalition is an international non-profit organisation which aims to simplify and facilitate the communication and management of rights in photographs and other graphic images. The aim is to ensure that all parties will be able to instantly determine the licence associated with any digital file. No longer will photographers (or their clients) need to search through old job folders and databases just to find the licence information associated with an image. The benefits of PLUS are described as providing standardised billing codes related to image rights, new revenue through streamlined re-licensing, work tracking that discourages the removal or alteration of the licence information embedded in a file, improved customer confidence delivered through more transparent and ethical industry-wide practices, and improved customer satisfaction.