DMU Resource Lists for Staff: Resource lists and copyright

The Copyright Licensing Agency (CLA) is responsible for providing a range of licences for educational institutions to enable copying and digitisation for distributing to students on a course of study.

Requests can be made under these licences and Library & Learning Services can make extracts available that fall within the licence.  Under the CLA licence we are permitted to digitise 1 chapter of a book or up to 10% and 1 article from a journal issue per module.  

DMU Resource Lists is the way to make most resources available to student legally either by linking to our subscribed content or by requesting digitisation.

To request a digitisation, you must create a Resource List for your module. Here is a guide on how to request digitisation from the Resource List system.

• I want my students to have access to an ebook that the library subscribes to

Find the eBook on Library Search and add it (by bookmarking it) to your DMU Resource List for that module

• I want my students to have access to an online journal article

Find the journal article from Library Search or other library database and add it to your module's DMU Resource List.

• I want my students to have access to a book that is only available in print in the library

We cannot digitise the whole book, but we may be able to digitise a chapter or up to 10% via our Copyright Licensing Agency Higher Education Licence. Bookmark the book on to your resource list and request digitisation of the chapter or section you need.  

• I want to link to an article that I have found online via ResearchGate or in similar repositories

You should only link to articles in repositories such as ResearchGate if you are absolutely sure that this is an acceptable version to be uploaded. Most authors will sign copyright over to the publisher who will have specific criteria as to what can be made available by the author.  Usually this means that the final PDF version cannot be made available.  If you are unsure if a version is legitimate, please contact the Copyright Officer (copyright@dmu.ac.uk).

• I have a PDF that I saved from a journal or a book and I want to make this available to students

Saving or downloading a PDF is for your own personal use only.  This does not extend to sharing with anyone else.  Uploading to LearningZone would constitute sharing and be in breach of the law and licence. However, you can either provide a link to the library subscribed version of the PDF, or request a digitisation via the DMU Resource List system.

• The library doesn’t have access to a book or a journal and I would like to recommend a chapter or article for my students

You can request a digitisation and the library may be able to obtain a copyright cleared copy from the British Library. If the extract falls within the scope of the licence, Library & Learning Services can digitise the chapter or article that can be made available on LearningZone via the DMU Resource List system.

• I would like students to access more than 1 chapter of a book or more than 1 article from a journal issue for my module

You are permitted to digitise 1 chapter of a book or up to10% and 1 article from a journal issue per module under the terms of the licence. If you wished to have access to a subsequent chapter of a book or another article form a journal issue for a different module, this would be eligible.  However, if the second chapter or article is core to your teaching requirement, then contact the Copyright Officer (copyright@dmu.ac.uk) for further help.