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Copyright for Solent Staff

Copyright Matters

Almost all original creative or intellectual works are eligible to be protected by copyright, and there is no need for the rights of the creator to be explicitly asserted. This means that most of the resources you use in teaching and research, whether print or electronic, whether published or not, will be protected by copyright. You need to make informed and responsible judgements about what to use, as infringements of copyright could ultimately lead to legal proceedings against you or the University. Fortunately, there are several routes to using a resource legitimately.

These pages are intended to help staff (and potentially students) at Solent make those judgements about what to use. Unless it is explicitly stated otherwise, it is assumed throughout that resources are used for non-commercial purposes (principally University teaching, academic research, and private-study). This guidance has been written by librarians, not lawyers, and it does not constitute legal advice. Please speak with your Information Librarian if you need any further assistance after reading this LibGuide.  

Using Resources in SOL - Quick Guide

Hopefully the rest of the guide will help you decide what can and can't be used in your teaching and research, but for quick reference, it is likely that you could do the following in your SOL unit pages:

You can ...

  • Have the Library digitise whole chapters and articles for use on SOL (more information below)
  • Link to Library-provided e-resources, including books and articles
  • Link to a website with information in the public domain
  • Include images that explicitly permit re-use
  • Include clips of television or radio programmes via Box of Broadcasts

For various reasons, it is usually preferable to link to items rather than uploading documents, but linking does not remove the need to consider the copyright issues in using a resource.

Digitisation

Digitisation of entire chapters or articles for distribution to students on a particular module is permitted under the CLA licence, but the scans must be requested from Solent Library's Digidocs service. Please note that there are restrictions on the amounts that can be copied, and not all publications are covered by the licence, so digitisation might not be possible for some material.

How Do I Find Out More?

If you have further questions on the CLA audit, please contact the James Clark, Library Systems and Discovery Manager, who is the University's CLA Licence co-ordinator.