The National Information Standards Organisation (NISO) voting members have approved a new project to develop standardised bibliographic metadata and visual indicators to describe the accessibility of journal articles as well as potentially describe how “open” an item is. Currently, there is no standardised bibliographic metadata that provide information on whether a specific article is freely readable and what re-use rights might be available to readers.  According to Nettie Lagace, NISO’s Associate Director for Programs,

  "the NISO OA Metadata and indicator project would complement other related efforts currently underway.”

These other related efforts include; CrossMark, How Open is It?, Vocabularies for OA (V4OA), ONIX-PL, the Linked Content Coalition, and NISO’s Open Discovery Initiative. The benefits of this new inititative will be realised by all stakeholders (funders, publishers, authors, readers, aggregator and discovery services) in the scholarly communication chain.