Question: How can I legally share an article with my team without infringing copyright?
Answer: It depends ...
When in doubt about sharing an article, use a permalink. [See #4 below.]
Under the Fair Use Clause of the Copyright law, libraries are allowed to provide a single copy of an article for the personal use of our patrons. Since Ascension Wisconsin Health Care is NOT considered an educational institution (even if your purposes are for continuing education), we do not get the same consideration as a university or a school for copyright purposes.
If you want to use an article for a class, meeting, committee/policy work, it's up to YOU to get copyright permission and or pay any royalties required. Sometimes this is easy--the authors and publishers want to have the info spread as far and wide as possible, so they sometimes grant permission without payment. Other times they require royalties for each copy made and distributed which can be quite costly.
Other options for providing the information without infringing copyright follow:
1) Provide a citation of the article--as with a reference or bibliography list. Then only those people who are most interested can follow-up with the library to get the full article individually.
2) Copy the first page of the article only. This usually gives enough info for library staff to track down a copy of the full article, and it gives more of a full-bodied flavor for the article than just a brief citation. But it doesn't give away so much that the copyright holders would be distressed, or lose income.
3) Summarize the article or provide an outline of major points, leaving the details for the full article.
4) If it is something that we have online access, you could also provide a link to the full-text.
- Yes: Providing a link to full-text is not considered the same as providing a photocopy --even though an individual may print a copy themselves. Most databases or publishers provide a persistent url or permalink to particular articles. If you are unsure of how to do this, contact us and we can help you.
- No: Forwarding a PDF of copyrighted material to a group of people is in direct violation of copyright laws and guidelines unless permission is noted or our licensing allows for this.
5) Materials such as the skill sheets, evidence-based care sheets, etc. taken from the Nursing Reference Center Plus may be copied, distributed, and adapted per our licensing agreement. Full text journal articles may be copied and distributed within Ascension Health Care but permission is required to use of any tables, forms, assessments, tools etc. that are found within a journal article.
6) Full Text articles accessed through ClinicalKey may be duplicated and distributed within Ascension Wisconsin. Permission is required to use of any tables, forms, assessments, tools etc. that are found within a journal article or ebook. Our license does allow us to copy and use images from Clinical Key's Image Collection for use within Ascension Wisconsin.
7) Full text articles accessed through the following databases and/or publishers may be duplicated and distributed within Ascension Wisconsin. Permission is required to use any tables, forms, assessments, tools etc. that are found within a journal article.
- OVID Medline or LWW eJournals
- BadgerLink (EBSCO)
- NEJM and JAMA
- CINAHL-FullText
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