Mark Bide joined Rightscom in March 2001, following nearly 10 years running his own consultancy. He has 35 years experience of the publishing industry, having been a Director of the European subsidiaries of both CBS Publishing and John Wiley & Sons. Subsequently, he developed one of the most highly respected independent publishing consultancies in the UK, with particular expertise in the impact of network technology on the information value chain.
Since the early 1990s, he has been deeply involved in metadata and identification initiatives, including the project. At Rightscom, Mark has undertaken projects on behalf of many clients including the European Commission, the British Library, the UK Publishers Association, EDItEUR, UKOLN, the JISC, the Publishers Licensing Society, the Copyright Licensing Agency, IFRRO, the International DOI Foundation, the Recording Industry Association of America, and the World Association of Newspapers. He remains engaged in standardization strategies, and was closely involved in the development of the MI3P standards project for the music industry, particularly the Global Release Identifier (GRid) and the Musical Works License Identifier (MWLI). He has long been an advocate of the requirement for machine-interpretable policy expression, and has been involved in the formulation of ONIX for Licensing Terms from its inception. He is the Project Coordinator for the ACAP Project.