RoMEO Studies 6: Rights metadata for open archiving

This is the final study in a series of six emanating from the UK JISC-funded RoMEO Project (Rights Metadata for Open-archiving) which investigated the Intellectual Property Rights (IPR) issues relating to academic author self-archiving of research papers. It reports the results of a survey of 542 academic authors showing the level of protection required for their open-access research papers. It then describes the selection of an appropriate means of expressing those rights through metadata and the resulting choice of Creative Commons licences. Finally it outlines proposals for communicating rights metadata via the Open Archives Initiative’s Protocol for Metadata Harvesting (OAI-PMH).