Copyright and electronic resources

After the copyright event on the 14th June there was some interest in what the rules were for electronic resources.

I have looked in to this issue in a bit more detail and the general conclusions seem to be that ebooks and ejournals have their own licences, which must be adhered to. The terms and conditions of these licences are generally available from publisher websites. In cases of aggregators who provide access to a range of journals from different publishers, you should refer to the policies outlined by each individual publisher. These may vary so if you are in doubt it is always preferable to refer to each individual publisher licence.

Therefore in terms of printing or sending articles by email to end-users you should only really be doing this if it is allowed within the terms of the licence. It is also worth remembering that most of our electronic resources require an Athens username and password so you can
always refer users to this point of access.

In the absence of any licence it is suggested that you treat and electronic resource like it was a printed item, therefore you could implement the rules as outlined by our CLA licence.

So the general rule would be to read the publisher's licence.

Virtual training

Click on the Virtual Training announcement on the e-Library home page at http://www.elib.scot.nhs.uk/ for information on online training for OVID, Proquest, Ebsco-Host, Web of Science and Refworks.

If you would like more information about these sessions or enquire about training on other services please contact derek.boyle@nes.scot.nhs.uk