FAQs

Making digital copies of text and images from print and electronic publications for course provision is governed by UK copyright law. The University pays for a Higher Education licence from the Copyright Licensing Agency which allows scanned extracts to be made available for courses of study. In order to comply with the licence, all scanning must be processed and managed by the E-reserve team. It is illegal to make your own scan of a copyright work and make it available to students without the express permission of the rights holder.

E-reserve is a service for course organisers. We work on your behalf to provide scans of copyrighted material for course users (via Resource Lists) under the University’s Higher Education Copyright Licence. This allows wider access to copyright materials than would normally be possible.

Scan and Deliver provides scans for the personal use of individual requesters only. The service is not licensed to supply scans for teaching.

Yes, you can if together they constitute 10% or less of the total publication. If the amount to be scanned exceeds this limit, however, you must indicate the chapter or pages you would like us to prioritise. In some circumstances, we may be able to get permission for a second chapter or additional 10%, although this cannot be guaranteed.

No. Digitised extracts are made available for download by students on a specified course only and are not transferrable. A copyright notice explaining this appears at the front of each PDF file. Using the same links for other courses raises a number of issues:

• Students on other courses can legally only browse scans made under the CLA HE Licence, not download or print.
• Where we have obtained the direct permission of the rights holder, the agreement covers ONLY the course for which it has been granted.
• If the original course ceases to run, or is not delivered in a particular year, the link is archived and will no longer connect to the reading.

If you would like to use the same reading for another Resource List, please make a separate digitisation request and submit that list for review. If you are not using a Resource List, contact the E-reserve team who will be happy to provide you with a new link.

This depends on the agreement you have signed with individual publishers and what their policy is on sharing pre-prints. You should check with them first. If the publisher is happy for you to make them available then it is best practice to upload them to the Edinburgh University research repository. If you do not have publisher permission, please contact E-reserve as we may be able to provide temporary password-controlled access until the publication date.

When uploading E-reserve scans to CANVAS, please select the option: ‘I have obtained permission to use this file’.

If you see the following message after clicking a digitisation link - ‘The content is currently not available. Please contact your lecturer/library for more information.’ -  it means the course is not currently active in our management system or the file visibility has been restricted for some reason. Please contact the E-reserve team directly and we will investigate:

ereserve@ed.ac.uk

Please report all Resource List e-book access issues to the Library Learning Services team:

library.learning@ed.ac.uk