Rights statement
Meaning & purpose
The RightsStatement element contains information about the rights applied to a collection or service. These may be intellectual property rights such as copyright or moral rights. It is contained within the Rights element wrapper.
Rights Statement attributes
Rights URI attribute
Optionally, include a Rights URI attribute to link to rights information relating to the registry object.
Use in Research Data Australia
Rights information is displayed prominently in Research Data Australia to support researchers in reuse of research collections. Information provided in RightsStatement is displayed under the label "Licence & Rights".
Best practice
Use this element to provide a statement about the rights applied to a collection or service. Optionally, provide a URI pointing to a rights statement.
Where practical, confine use of the RightsStatement element to information relating to rights only, and provide licence and access rights information in child elements within the Rights wrapper (see XML encoding example 1). Where this is not possible, RightsStatement may be used for a combined statement describing rights, access and licence details; this may be necessary where the source of content (e.g. an institutional repository) is only able to provide a single rights statement and/or URI (see XML encoding example 2).
This element may be populated from other metadata sources including:
- dcterms:rights
- AGRkMS Rights Statement
- ISO 2146 rights
- DataCite Rights
XML encoding examples
Example 1: Preferred use of RightsStatement element with rights, licence and access information provided as separate elements
<rights>
<rightsStatement rightsUri="http://unisa.edu.au/About-UniSA/Governance-and-management-structure/Copyright-at-UniSA/">Copyright 2014, The University of South Australia</rightsStatement>
<licence type="CC-BY" rightsUri="http://creativecommons.org/licenses/by/4.0/au/">
<accessRights type="Open" rightsUri="http://w3.unisa.edu.au/policies/policies/resrch/res20.asp">
</rights>
Example 2: Alternative use of RightsStatement element to provide rights, licence and access information in a single statement
<rights>
<rightsStatement>The owner of this data collection may provide access by negotiation. You may be required to indicate your intended use of the data and to meet any costs associated with providing you the data.
Other terms and conditions may also apply.
Use of the data may be subject to legal, ethical or commercial restrictions requiring permission from other individuals or groups, including ethics committees and research participants.</rightsStatement>
</rights>