The Copyright Licensing Agency (CLA) HE Licence
The CLA is the UK’s reproduction rights organisation which was set up by authors and publishers to license the copying of books, journals and periodicals. The CLA is responsible for distributing fees between rights holders whose work has been photocopied or scanned.
The University of Portsmouth has a CLA Higher Education Licence that enables the copying or scanning of licensed material for electronic delivery to students of designated courses/modules over a secure network. As a licensed institution we can:
- Copy 10% of a book or one chapter – whichever is the greatest
- Copy 10% of a magazine/journal or a whole article* – whichever is the greatest (*increasing to two articles in an issue from 1 August 2024)
- Copy short stories and poems of up to ten pages from anthologies
- Scan from books, journals and magazines from all over the world
- Make copies of content from digital material including e-books, online journals and free-to-view websites
- Copy an entire report of a case from a published report of judicial proceedings
- Type in the ISBN or title into an easy to use Check Permissions search tool to find out if a particular work is covered by the Licence
- Create accessible versions of texts and images for visually impaired students
- Project web pages onto your whiteboard or screen
- Embed images into your own work
- Create course packs using extracts from a range of print and digital material
Please note that any digital copies made under this licence, whether they are scanned extracts from printed material or extracts copied from digital publications, must be requested via a reading list (see below).
Excluded categories
Some categories and individual works are excluded and therefore cannot be copied at all under the CLA Licence. These include:
- printed music (including the words)
- maps and charts
- newspapers
- internet blogs
Please note also that a number of publishers and authors are not mandated by the CLA and therefore all or some of their publications may not be copied under the terms of the CLA licence. Details about excluded categories and works that cannot be copied can be found here: https://www.cla.co.uk/excluded/he-print
CLA issues its licences on behalf of copyright owners on a broad ‘inclusive’ basis whereby every book, journal, magazine or other periodical published in the UK is included in its licences except where a copyright owner does not wish to participate, in which case they are free to opt out of the scheme and their works, or in some cases specifically identified works, are then excluded from CLA licence coverage. Organisations based in countries overseas typically grant CLA authority to issue licences to copy on a similar basis to CLA’s. In the United States the Copyright Clearance Center (CCC) has always operated on a different basis whereby only the works of those US publishers who have chosen to participate in CCC licences are included. You may therefore find that works published exclusively in the USA will be excluded and cannot be copied.
There are also a number of important points to note:
- in certain areas the University has separate licence agreements and it is worth checking in each case
- reproduction under the licence is not intended as a substitute for the purchase of an original published edition
- the licence does not remove or diminish any of the copyright exceptions extended to students and members of staff who have any kind of visual impairment, dyslexia or other disability and who may receive an accessible copy of a copyright protected work
Copyright notice
The CLA recommends that its HE Copyright Notice, advising users what can be copied under the licence, should be downloaded to be printed and displayed beside all fixed location copying machines in the University. See the link below for the local version of this notice.
Digital Copies
If you wish to make scanned extracts from books, magazines or journals available to your students then
- the item you require must be on a reading list, and
- the digital copy must have been requested via the Library’s Request Digitisation service, which uses the Talis Aspire Digitised Content system (TADC).
Staff may no longer scan extracts of published works themselves and upload them to Moodle.
All digital copies have to be reported to the CLA, a process that used to be processed manually. Following an agreement between Talis and the CLA we are now able to use TADC to provide automatic reports to the CLA. The service does not allow split reporting, which is why all digitisations have to be arranged by the Library.
If you have any questions about the creation of digital copies then please contact the University’s CLA Licence Co-ordinator: David Sherren david.sherren@port.ac.uk