Acceptable Use of Electronic Resources

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The University Libraries subscribes to thousands of electronic journals, books, and databases for use by authorized users (current faculty, students and staff and, in most cases, on-site visitors and formally affiliated researchers and scholars). The terms and conditions for using these resources are defined in license agreements with each publisher. Licensed resources are for academic, research, or other educational purposes by authorized users of the University of Colorado Boulder. Use of these resources is governed by copyright law, individual license agreements, and the Acceptable Use of CU-Boulder’s IT Resources policy.

Users should be aware that publishers monitor use levels of electronic resources to verify compliance with license agreements. Breach of license by a single user may result in the publisher suspending the university's access without warning.

While licenses vary from publisher to publisher, here are some general terms of use included in most licenses:

You may:You may not:

Search, view, save, print, download individual articles or search results.

Example: Printing individual articles to annotate and highlight.

Systematically download content, for examples through use of crawlers, scripts, robots or intelligent agents.

Example: Writing a script to screen scrape content from a journal website.

Note: The Libraries may be able to work with some publishers to obtain access or content for data and text mining purposes. For more information please contact crdds@colorado.edu.

Use the resource for scholarly, educational or scientific research, teaching, or private study.

Example: Regularly reading the latest issue of a journal to stay abreast of developments in your field.

Use, distribute, or sell articles to individuals, institutions, or organizations for commercial purposes.

Example: Using market research reports while employed at a corporation during a summer internship.

Link to an article or ebook on a syllabus or within a course management system.

Example: Provide link in Canvas to an ebook available through the library and being taught in a course.

Note: The notable exception to this is Harvard Business Review articles. URLs to HBR articles may not be included in a syllabus or course management systems.

Transmit, disseminate, or otherwise make content available to unauthorized users. 

Example: Posting a .pdf of an article on a public website.

 

Modify or create a derivative work; remove, obscure, or modify any copyright or other notices included in the resource, or reverse engineer, decompile, disassemble, or otherwise alter, frame, or simulate the appearance of licensed content. 

Example: Compiling portions of data from a database to create another database for a subset of researchers.