Disclaimer
The information presented here is only general information. Legal advice must be provided in the course of an attorney-client relationship specifically with reference to all the facts of the particular situation under consideration. Such is not the case here, and accordingly, the information presented here must not be relied on as a substitute for obtaining legal advice from a licensed attorney.
Legal matters concerning the College at Geneseo should be referred to SUNY Office of General Counsel.
This LibGuide borrows material from "Fair Use and Copyright for Online Education" by the University of Rhode Island University Libraries, shared under a Creative Commons Attribution 4.0 International License.
Tips for using text material in online education
To best position yourself to assert a fair use argument when using textual materials, consider doing the following:
- Link to the texts if possible rather than making an electronic copy available to students. Linking to materials is ordinarily not a violation of copyright but rather a technological instruction for locating materials.
- If copying a text, use no more than is needed to serve your purpose.
- Avoid copying materials created and marketed primarily for use in courses such as the one at hand (e.g. a textbook, workbook, or anthology designed for the course). Use of more than a brief excerpt from such works on digital networks is unlikely to be transformative and therefore unlikely to be a fair use.
- Make sure that the texts serve a pedagogical purpose; do not use as entertainment.
- Place the texts in the context of the course, explaining why they were chosen and what they are intended to illustrate. Recontextualize the texts when appropriate through the addition of study questions, commentary, criticism, annotation, and student reactions.
- Limit access to the texts to students enrolled in the course.
- Notify students that the texts are being made available for teaching, study, and research only.
- For each text, provide an acknowledgement of the source, copyright, and publisher.
Resources for using text material in online education
- Code of Best Practices in Fair Use for Academic and Research LibrariesAssociation of Research Libraries, 2012
- PubMed Central This link opens in a new windowPubMed Central (PMC) is the U.S. National Institutes of Health (NIH) free digital archive of biomedical and life sciences journal literature.
- Google Book Search This link opens in a new windowThere are many full-text books available through Google Books. Using the Advanced Search screen, check off ”Full view only” under ”Search”.
- HathiTrust Digital Library This link opens in a new windowHathiTrust is a massive full-text digital library comprising more than 10 million volumes contributed by more than 60 major research institutions and libraries.
- Google Scholar This link opens in a new windowGoogle Scholar enables you to search specifically for scholarly literature, including peer-reviewed papers, theses, books, preprints, abstracts and technical reports from all broad areas of research.
- Internet Archive Ebook and Texts Archive"Download free books and texts. The Internet Archive Text Archive contains a wide range of fiction, popular books, children's books, historical texts and academic books. The collection is open to the community for the contribution of any type of text, many licensed using Creative Commons licenses."
- Open LibraryOpen Library is an open, editable library catalog, building towards a web page for every book ever published
- OAPENOpen Access Publishing in European Networks: "Freely accessible academic books, mainly in the area of Humanities and Social Sciences."
- BASE (Bielefeld Academic Search Engine)Search engine for academic open access web resources.
- CORE (COnnecting REpositories)CORE (COnnecting REpositories) aims to facilitate free access to scholarly publications distributed across many systems. CORE provides access to millions of scholarly articles aggregated from many open access repositories.
- OpenAIRESearch publications and datasets from open access repositories and journals.
- OpenDOAR (Directory of Open Access Repositories) SearchThis service lets you search the contents of the repositories listed in OpenDOAR, an authoritative directory of academic open access repositories, for freely available academic research information. Full text is available for most results.
- OAIster"OAIster is a union catalog of millions of records representing open access resources.... includes more than 25 million records representing digital resources from more than 1,100 contributors."
- Library of Congress American MemoryProvides free and open access through the Internet to written and spoken words, sound recordings, still and moving images, prints, maps, and sheet music that document the American experience.
- Digital Public Library of AmericaDPLA includes millions of materials from libraries, archives, museums, and other cultural institutions across the country available to all in a one-stop discovery experience.
