Requesting scans direct from E-reserve

What you do

Send us a list of the new material you would like to be provided as digital extracts. There is no need to re-request previously supplied readings for a course.  This must include the following information:

• Course title and code
• Course duration – Semester 1, Semester 2 or whole year
• Number of students expected to register for the course
• Full bibliographic details of each chapter or article. A page range alone is not sufficient as page numbers can vary between editions, and it is unclear whether the range would exceed the copyright limits below
• Library shelfmark from DiscoverEd
• Order of priority if requesting more than one chapter from the same publication
• An indication of whether an extract is essential  reading

Providing this information helps us to carry out copyright checks, locate the source material, prioritise your requests and avoid potential delays in processing your requests.

Please submit completed forms to ereserve@ed.ac.uk

We process a high volume of readings each year. Please give us as much notice as possible by submitting all your new scanning requests well in advance of the start of semester.

Current submission deadlines

What we do

The E-reserve service is governed by the terms of the Copyright Licensing Agency Higher Education Licence.

We check the requests for Library ownership, copyright compliance and availability before scanning the relevant pages.

We notify you if any readings are not covered by the CLA HE Licence and an e-book is not available as an alternative. The E-reserve team carries out limited copyright clearance (see section below). Please be aware that we may not be able to scan everything that you have requested.

We provide you with a link to the scan which can be used year on year for that course. For licensing reasons E-reserve scans must not be uploaded directly to your Virtual Learning Environment. Students must only access them via the link we provide. 

Scanned 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.  

If you would like the same reading to be used on another course, please contact the E-reserve team. We will then supply you with a separate link.

CLA HE Licence conditions and copyright clearance

The Library can make and supply digital versions of articles and chapters if the source copy is:

• owned / subscribed to by the Library; and
• published in certain countries; or
• from publishers who have signed global mandates with the CLA (allowing scanning from their titles irrespective of the country of publication).

We can reproduce extracts of up to:

• 1 chapter of a book
• 2 journal articles per issue, or up to a whole issue if it is devoted to a particular theme
• 1 paper of one set of conference proceedings
• 1 report of a single case from a report of judicial proceedings
• 1 short story or 1 poem or 1 play of not more than 10 pages in an anthology of short stories, poems or plays

Or 10% of the whole (whichever is the greater).

Any material not covered by the Licence must be cleared with the copyright holder before any digital versions can be made. The E-reserve team will pursue permission, where practical, only for readings highlighted as essential:

• where the title is covered by the Licence, but the material requested exceeds the licence limits, we will scan what is allowable and pursue clearance for 1 additional extract.
• where the title is excluded from the licence we will pursue clearance for 1 extract.

We are not able to guarantee a positive response from rights holders, or timescales for receiving a response. Publishers can take several weeks, may not respond at all, or the fee quoted may be prohibitive.

Where a reading has been provided with the direct permission of the rights holder, this is normally only valid for the current academic year and we will contact you before the next session regarding re-use of the material.

Higher Education Licence information from the CLA

Licence document

International territories and Global mandates

Further information and help

For further information or help using the E-reserve service please contact either the E-reserve team or the Academic Support Librarian for your School.