Open access metadata - an innovative NISO project

Abstract

The paper introduces NISO open access metadata and indicators project. The project addresses the need of establishing the terms that unambiguously could indicate the OA status of the scholarly publications. Two indicators are than proposed: "free to read" and "reference licence". The NISO Working Group believes that these should suffice to make understandable the OA status to any user of the resource that was made freely available through the Internet. The NISO project includes the appropriate recommendations for publishers and content providers and outlines the further work on the OA indicators to be carried out (e.g. to set up these indicators as mandatory elements for various metadata structures).