<license>

License Information

Set of conditions under which the content may be used, accessed, and distributed.

Related Elements

JATS has several elements that deal with the usage, permissions, and licensing. Some of these elements are taken from the NISO Access License and Indicators (ALI) 2015 Recommended Practice specification. The other element is JATS-specific and predates the NISO recommendation:
  • <ali:free_to_read> — This NISO ALI element is a simple flag whose presence indicates that the document is free-to-read, without making statements about any additional reuse rights or restrictions. Date attributes can specify when the document is free to be read.
  • <ali:license_ref> — This NISO ALI element points to a public license or waiver. By “public”, NISO means that the offer is generally and not privately offered. Such a license may be either human or machine-readable text that explains the terms of use or reuse for the content.
  • <license> — A JATS-specific element whose content describes a set of conditions under which the content may be used, accessed, and distributed. This element was provided to hold the license text. The 2015 NISO ALI recommendation is to store in the XML document a URI that points to the license instead of the full license text. For users who adopt the NISO ALI recommendation, the <license> element could be used to hold a short representation of the license, a sentence or two to be used for display. Alternatively, a publisher could choose not to implement NISO ALI and to put the text of the license in <license>.
    The <license> element takes the @xlink:href attribute to point to the text of the license. However, the new NISO ALI element <ali:license_ref> performs the same pointing function. JATS best practice is to omit the @xlink:href attribute from <license> if a NISO ALI <ali:license_ref> is used.

Attributes

id Document Internal Identifier
license-type Type of License
specific-use Specific Use
xlink:actuate Actuating the Link
xlink:href Href (Linking Mechanism)
xlink:role Role of the Link
xlink:show Showing the Link
xlink:title Title of the Link
xlink:type Type of Link
xml:base Base
xml:lang Language
xmlns:xlink XLink Namespace Declaration

Content Model

<!ELEMENT  license      %license-model;                              >

Expanded Content Model

((ali:license_ref | license-p)+)

Description

Any one of:

This element may be contained in:

<permissions>

Example 1

Indicating that the document is an “open access” article available under the terms of a Creative Commons Attribution License:
...
<article-meta>
...
<permissions>
<license license-type="open-access"
xlink:href="http://creativecommons.org/licenses/by/2.0/">
<license-p>This is an open-access article distributed under the terms of the
Creative Commons Attribution License, which permits unrestricted use,
distribution, and reproduction in any medium, provided the original
work is properly cited.</license-p>
</license>
</permissions>
<related-article related-article-type="companion"
xlink:title="synopsis" xlink:href="10.1371/journal.pbio.0020359"
vol="2" page="e359">
<article-title>How to Make a Mother in Five Easy Steps</article-title>
</related-article>
...
</article-meta>
...

Example 2

The document has an “open license” from examplesite.org starting on February 3, 2019:
   
...
<permissions>
<license>
<ali:license_ref xmlns:ali="http://www.niso.org/schemas/ali/1.0/" start_date="2015-02-03">
http://www.examplesite.org/open_license.html</ali:license_ref>
</license>
</permissions>
...

Article Authoring Tag Library NISO JATS Version 1.2 (ANSI/NISO Z39.96-2019)

Version of May 2019

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