I have been struggling with some difficult terms while working on the draft Darwin Core RDF Guide. At the moment, the term that I've been struggling with is dcterms:accessRights, which is imported by Darwin Core from Dublin Core as a record-level term.
In the case of dcterms:accessRights (defined as "Information about who can access the resource or an indication of its security status." with comment "Access Rights may include information regarding access or restrictions based on privacy, security, or other policies."), the range is given as dcterms:RightsStatement (i.e. a non-literal value is expected rather than a string literal). Thus a client interpreting a dcterms:accessRights property should expect a URI reference pointing to another resource that is a Rights Statement, defined as "A statement about the intellectual property rights (IPR) held in or over a Resource, a legal document giving official permission to do something with a resource, or a statement about access rights."
So dcterms:accessRights seems to be a rather vague term that is intended to point to additional information about: 1. intellectual property rights (i.e. copyright) 2. permission to do something with a resource (i.e. licensing information) 3. access rights (i.e. to what extent access to the resource is controlled)
These are actually three rather different types of information about a resource. It seems to me that the first two items are about created intellectual property - the territory of Audubon Core. Audubon Core has a pretty rich vocabulary for describing these kinds of properties that media are likely to have. But they don't seem to apply so much to Darwin Core, which is more about data and specimens, neither one of which can be copyrighted or licensed as far as I can know. So it seems to me that item 3 is the most relevant to Darwin Core, since data can be embargoed, access to specimens can be restricted, loans prohibited, etc. The ancient history on the accessRights term at http://dublincore.org/usage/meetings/2002/10/accessRights.shtml seems to indicate that the term was originally intended to serve to describe the limitations of access but that it got thrown together with intellectual property rights and licensing when the range was declared to be "RightsStatement" several years later.
Anyway, I'm not how this term would get used in the context of specimens and observations. The DwC comment give the example "not-for-profit use only" which sounds more like a licensing statement such as Creative Commons-NC . When Audubon Core comes online, xmpRights:UsageTerms and xmpRights:WebStatement will be available to provide that kind of information for images and other media. We also have dwc:informationWithheld to tell people that some information is not available to the public. So under what circumstances would I actually use dcterms:accessRights? Is there anybody who uses it as a property in their metadata and can give me some real examples of its use? I'm sure there was a reason given when Darwin Core was undergoing ratification, but I don't remember the discussion, and it is too overwhelming to think of digging through the email archives to look for it.
Steve