Guidelines for Fair Use of E-Resources

Electronic resources such as e-journals, online databases, e-books made available by the Central Library, Tezpur University are for academic use only. Please ensure that the resource is used for educational and research purposes and not for commercial purposes.
If you are a faculty member, you can print out a copy of an article from an electronic journal and include it in your course pack. However, do not make multiple copies for circulation. Copyright laws protect published material in any format so that it cannot be copied except in accordance with fair use. Providing access to material for educational purposes falls within the realm of fair use.
Electronic distribution of content is also restricted although the specific restrictions vary from publisher to publisher. It may be permissible to forward an article to another colleague in your own institution by email, however, transmitting an article to someone outside of the institution, or to a large group of recipients, a mailing list, or an electronic bulletin board, is not allowed.
Providing electronic links on your course web pages to the Library's licensed resources is permitted but you cannot post the PDF of an article on your website. The publishers' main concern is that people outside of your campus network should not be able to access resources licensed by your institution. However, a researcher can post a pre-print of an article written by himself.
Please be aware that systematic downloading will cause the publisher to block to the entire community of users @ Tezpur University from accessing these resources.

CONDITIONS OF USE AND LICENSING RESTRICTIONS FOR ELECTRONIC RESOURCES

The Consortium subscribes to thousands of electronic journals and bibliographic databases for use by authorized users in member institutions. The terms and conditions for using these resources are spelled out in electronic resource license agreements with each publisher. It is the responsibility of individual users to ensure that the use of electronic resources does not breach the terms and conditions specified in the license agreements. Licenses vary from publisher to publisher; however, the general principles are as follows:

Permitted

Not Permitted

Viewing, downloading, copying, printing and saving a copy of search results
Viewing, downloading, copying, printing and saving individual articles
Using e-resources for scholarly, educational or scientific research, teaching, private study and clinical purposes
Sending a copy of an article to another authorized user (i.e. current faculty, students or staff)
Posting the URL to the publisher's version of the article on a class website (publisher links will allow only authorized users access)

Use of robots or intelligent agents to do systematic, bulk or automatic downloading is not permitted
Systematic downloading or printing of entire journal issues or volumes, or large portions of other e-resources is not permitted
Using e-resources for commercial gain is not permitted (i.e. reselling, redistributing or republishing licensed content)
Transmitting, disseminating or otherwise making online content available to unauthorized users (i.e. sending to mailing lists or electronic bulletin boards) is not permitted
Posting the publisher's version or PDF of an article to an open class website is not permitted (instead, post the URL to the article which will allow only authorized users access)

Breaches of the license agreement with publishers could result in the suspension of access to the resources for the member institutions.

Guidelines for Fair Use of E-Resources

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