RoMEO studies 5: IPR issues facing OAI data and service providers

This paper is the fifth in a series of studies emanating from the UK Joint Information Systems Committee (JISC)‐funded RoMEO Project (rights metadata for open‐archiving). The paper reports the results of two surveys of OAI data providers (DPs) and service providers (SPs) with regards to the rights issues they face. It finds that very few DPs have rights agreements with depositing authors and that there is no standard approach to the creation of rights metadata. The paper considers the rights protection afforded individual and collections of metadata records under UK law and contrasts this with DPs' and SPs' views on the rights status of metadata and how they wish to protect it. The majority of DPs and SPs believe that a standard way of describing both the rights status of documents and of metadata would be useful.