Requesting scans for teaching

The Library manages the provision of copyright-compliant digitisations (scans) using Resource Lists. Course Organisers can request digitisations of book chapters, extracts or articles for use in teaching. Digitisations are provided by the E-reserve team mainly under the Copyright Licensing Agency (CLA) Licence.

If you would like the Library to provide a copyright-compliant digitisation for course teaching:

• Add the item to your Resource List
• Add a Priority tag (‘Essential’ or ‘Recommended’).
• Add a ‘Note for students’ with information about the required extract - include page ranges and the chapter title, if there is one, as pagination can vary between editions.
• Add any additional information using 'Note for Library'.

When you have finished updating your Resource List, send it to the Library by clicking ‘My list is ready’ at the top of your Resource List or select 'Send list to Library' from the list menu.

Each request is checked to see if a suitable e-book is available and purchased as an alternative to a scan.

When it’s ready, a link to the digitisation will be added to the Resource List citation along with a ‘Digitisation available’ tag to highlight to students that a scan is available.

Copyright law does not allow unregulated digitisation of in-copyright articles or book chapters for provision to students on courses of study. You should not scan copyright materials yourself or upload scanned content to the Learn course or a Resource List.

Scanned extracts are provided by the Library for courses of study using a licence from the UK Copyright Licensing Agency.

What can the Library scan for a course of study?

Under the licence 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 the UK and certain other countries; or
• from publishers who have signed global mandates with the Copyright Licensing Agency (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).

Details of all extracts used under the Licence are required to be reported annually to the Copyright Licensing Agency and this is co-ordinated by the E-reserve team.

Licence documents on the Copyright Licensing Agency website

Where a title is excluded from the Copyright Licensing Agency licence or an amount exceeding 10% has been requested, in certain circumstances the E-reserve Team will pursue direct permission from rights holders to use the extract.

If an item is not covered by the CLA licence and has been tagged as 'Essential', the E-reserve team will pursue permission directly from rights holders:

• 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 one additional extract.
• Where the title is excluded from the licence, we will pursue clearance for a single extract.

Please bear in mind:

• We are unable to guarantee a positive response from rights holders, or timescales for receiving a response.
• Permissions obtained directly from rights holders are granted for the particular course of study and are normally only valid for the current academic year. We will contact you before the next session regarding re-use of the material.
• An extract may contain a substantial amount of material, e.g., images, which are the copyright of a third party and in such cases it may not be practical to pursue permission from all rights holders.

Please follow the Resource List deadlines above. We aim to process all requests received by the deadline in time for the course start date, copyright issues permitting. There may be exceptions where copyright permission cannot be obtained, or where copyright costs are too high.

Requests received after the deadline will still be considered. Depending on demand, we may need to prioritise them, focussing initially on essential items. Any further prioritisation may take into consideration such factors as the size of the class and those items required for initial weeks of teaching.

There is separate process for requesting copyright-compliant digitisations for non-credit bearing courses hosted on the University’s Short Courses Platform.

Short Courses Platform Copyright and Licensing

Requests for digitisations for teaching should not be made through the Library Scan and Deliver service. Scans provided by that service are for personal use only and cannot be further distributed to students on a course of study.

Scan and Deliver