Skip to main content
Updated ALI Recommended Practice Now Available

Updated ALI Recommended Practice Now Available

November 2021

Baltimore, MD | November 29, 2021:

The National Information Standards Organization (NISO) today announced publication of its updated Access & License Indicators (ALI) Recommended Practice (NISO RP-22-2021). Originally published in 2015, this Recommended Practice defines the metadata indicators used to indicate free-to-read content, as well as for linking to license terms for the use/re-use of that content.

In response to community feedback, the ALI Recommended Practice has now been updated to include metadata and indicators that allow content metadata users to filter or target subsets of license information. Content platforms and other applications can use this additional information to determine which of the asserted license or sharing indicators have relevance to their particular context.  For example, a content hosting service could determine whether its users are permitted to share a specific journal article version—or elements of it—with researcher collaboration groups or on public profiles. 

ALI Revision Working Group co-chair, Esther Heuver (Business Development Manager - Mendeley, Elsevier) commented, “We hope that the information community will find our work to update the ALI Recommended Practice helpful. By including an additional attribute definition (applies_to), publishers and platforms can now utilize ALI tagging to assert specific permission contexts for their research articles.”  

Fellow co-chair Dan O’Brien (Assistant Director, Publishing Technology, American Chemical Society) added, “Our thanks go to all the members of the ALI Revision Working Group for their work to update the Recommended Practice.”

NISO's Associate Executive Director, Nettie Lagace, commented, "We are very grateful to Esther, Dan, and all the ALI Revision Working Group members for their work to update this Recommended Practice. Publishers, content platforms, and others will now be able to better ensure that the right content is free to access for the right people and groups, making it a valuable resource for everyone in the information community.” 

The Access & License Indicators (ALI) Recommended Practice (NISO RP-22-2021) is openly available for everyone to implement at https://www.niso.org/standards-committees/ali-revision.

About NISO

Based in Baltimore, MD, NISO’s mission is to build knowledge, foster discussion, and advance authoritative standards development through collaboration among the cultural, scholarly, scientific, and professional communities. To fulfill this mission, NISO engages with libraries, publishers, information aggregators, and other organizations that support learning, research, and scholarship through the creation, organization, management, and curation of knowledge. NISO works with intersecting communities of interest and across the entire lifecycle of information standards. NISO is a not-for-profit association accredited by the American National Standards Institute (ANSI). For more information, visit the NISO website (https://niso.org) or contact us at nisohq@niso.org.