For Lecturers and Instructors

The purpose of this section is to provide faculty with guidance about the reproduction and distribution of their work and the work of others in the course of teaching and publication of their work, in addition to the information found in Copyright Basics.

You may include the following in your lectures at the University -

Short quotes and extracts - all types of copyright works, e.g. text, illustrations

‘Fair dealing’ for the purpose illustration for instruction permits lecturers to copy and display to students on the course of study brief or short extracts from literary, artistic and musical works, films, sound recordings and broadcasts, so long as:

  • the material is used to illustrate or reinforce a teaching point
  • only what is reasonably required to illustrate or reinforce a teaching point is copied and displayed
  • extracts from material provided under the illustration for instruction exception is limited to those students being instructed
  • the material made available must not be made available to the public, e.g. made available online in a website or repository or social media
  • original sources are cited unless to do so is impractical.

‘Fair dealing’ for the purposes of criticism, review, quotation, news reporting permits lecturers to quote from a copyright work (whether for criticism or review or otherwise) in their lectures, so long as:

  • the work quoted from has been made available to the public, e.g. the work has been published
  • the extent of the quotation is no more than is required for the specific purpose which it is being used
  • if used for criticism or review, the quotation from the work must be directly relevant to the criticism or review undertaken of the work
  • if used for criticism or review, the criticism or review must directly accompany the quotation from the work being criticised or reviewed, e.g. on the same or immediately preceding or following PowerPoint slide in a lecture
  • original sources are cited unless to do so is impractical.

In some instances, use of an entire work may be justified under the exception’s criticism or review limb, e.g. use of a photograph or an image of a work of art with accompanying criticism or review.  

Also, short extracts from a film or sound recording may be used (only as much as is reasonably required) if the use is for criticism or review of the source work.

Concerning the news reporting exception, use of photographs is excluded from the exception, but short clips of video/film or broadcast footage to report directly on a current event are the most common way of fair dealing for news reporting.

Films and sound recordings (short clips only if your lecture is recorded)

A copyright exception in UK law permits you to show/play whole commercial films/DVDs and sound recordings/CDs during your live lectures.  

However, the exception is not available if your lecture is being recorded, so only short clips that illustrate your teaching point (relying on the copyright exceptions of fair dealing ‘illustration for instruction’, or fair dealing for ‘criticism, review, quotation’) may be included in a lecture recording to be provided to your students in Moodle/VLE.  

In practical terms, if your lecture is being recorded, you should pause the recording when a commercial film or sound recording is shown or played, or edit out any music, videos or films beyond short clips that illustrate a specific teaching point.

Where students need to watch a whole film or listen to whole sound recordings, you may direct them to a library copy they can borrow, or to a website where they can legally listen or watch or download a copy.

YouTube and other videos, website pages (short clips or extracts only if your lecture is recorded)

If a video is freely available on the open Internet and you do not suspect that the video is infringing or otherwise unlawful, then displaying it in a lecture is permitted, provided that the video is played live from the Internet rather than from a copy or download of the video. Similarly, displaying live website pages in your lecture is permitted.

Television/radio broadcasts

The University’s Educational Recording Agency (ERA) Licence permits the recording of television and radio programmes and the showing/playing of those recordings to students and making the recordings available in Moodle in a password-protected intranet such as Moodle/VLE for student use.

Creative Commons-licensed material etc.

You may use all types of copyright works, for example, reproducing extracts from a literary, artistic, dramatic or musical works, sound recordings or films provided they have been released by its copyright owner(s) under a Creative Commons Attribution Licence (CC BY Licence), or a Creative Commons Attribution-Non-Commercial Licence (CC BY-NC Licence) or the UK Government’s Open Government Licence, or on website or other platform terms that permit reproduction for educational purposes (not only ‘personal and non-commercial use’).

Out-of-copyright material

If copyright no longer subsists in a work, it is said to be in the ‘public domain’ and no permission is required to copy or use that work or quotations, extracts or excerpts from it, but the source must be acknowledged.

According to UK copyright law, the standard term of copyright is to the end of the calendar year 70 years after the author’s death.  However, the standard term does not always apply, notably for unpublished works that may be in copyright until the end of the calendar year 2039.

Best to consult the following copyright duration charts:

The National Archives copyright duration charts for UK literary, artistic, dramatic and musical works , look for “flowcharts for Crown copyright and non-Crown copyright”;

The Intellectual Property Office (IPO) UK copyright duration information for sound recordings, films and the typographical arrangements of published literary, dramatic or musical works .

Material where the copyright owner has granted permission directly to you upon your request 

A copyright exception in UK law permits you to show/play whole commercial films/DVDs and sound recordings/CDs during your live lectures.  

However, the exception is not available if your lecture is being recorded, so only short clips that illustrate your teaching point (relying on the copyright exceptions of fair dealing ‘illustration for instruction’, or fair dealing for ‘criticism, review, quotation’) may be included in a lecture recording to be provided to your students in Moodle/VLE.

In practical terms, if your lecture is being recorded, you should pause the recording when a commercial film or sound recording is shown or played, or the recording should be edited out before making it available to your students.

Where students need to watch a whole film or listen to whole sound recordings, you may direct them to a library copy they can borrow, or to a website where they can legally listen or watch or download a copy.

If a video is freely available on the open Internet and you do not suspect that the video is infringing or otherwise unlawful, then displaying it in a lecture is permitted, provided that the video is played live from the Internet rather than from a copy or download of the video. Similarly, displaying live website pages in your lecture is permitted.

 

The University’s ERA Licence permits the recording of television and radio programmes, the showing/playing of those recordings to students in lectures and making the recordings available in a password-protected intranet such as Moodle/VLE for student use, as long as the following conditions are met:

  • Recordings must be for non-commercial educational purposes only
  • Recordings must not be edited or modified, although extracts may be used
  • Recordings must be marked/labelled with the date of the broadcast/recording, the title of the programme, the name of the broadcaster, and the following statement: ‘This recording is to be used only for educational and non-commercial purposes under the terms of the ERA Licence.’
  • Copies may be made of the broadcast recording, but not of videos and DVDs sold commercially
  • Recordings of broadcasts or extracts thereof may not be incorporated into any commercial video or DVD or other production, nor may they be sold.

ERA Licence conditions are available at: www.era.org.uk .

If you hold a personal subscription with Netflix, you agree to be contractually and legally bound to abide by Netflix Terms of Use: https://help.netflix.com/legal/termsofuse

4.2. The Netflix service and any content viewed through the service are for your personal and non-commercial use only and may not be shared with individuals beyond your household. During your Netflix membership we grant you a limited, non-exclusive, non-transferable right to access the Netflix service and view Netflix content. Except for the foregoing, no right, title or interest shall be transferred to you. You agree not to use the service for public performances.

Consequently, you would need to obtain permission from Netflix in order to show the content to your students.

You may check YouTube or other video sites for availability of the clip you wish to use. Alternatively, you can buy or borrow a copy of the video, e.g. on DVD, Bluray, and show it under the UK copyright exception which permits the showing/playing of whole commercial films/sound recordings during your live lectures (only short clips or extracts if your lecture is recorded).  Netflix may also be contacted for permission/a licence to show a Netflix copyright-owned film.  Finally, students may access the content on their own through their own Netflix subscription accounts or investigate whether the film is available in other formats.

You may provide the following in Moodle to your students:

Short quotes and extracts - all types of copyright works, e.g. text, illustrations

‘Fair dealing’ with a copyright work for the sole purpose of illustration for instruction, the ‘teaching exception’ in UK copyright law, permits the copying and display of short extracts or passages from all types of copyright works, including your own published work, in Moodle or another University restricted intranet, if the following conditions are met:

  • the extract is used to illustrate or reinforce a teaching point, not to embellish a presentation
  • only what is reasonably required to illustrate or reinforce a teaching point is copied and provided, i.e. quote only what is necessary to get your point across
  • the extract is provided in a restricted intranet such as Moodle to students on a course of study and is limited to those students being instructed
  • the extract is not made available to the public, e.g. online in a website or open repository or in social media
  • the author/creator and title of the source work must be provided, unless it is impractical to do so.

In addition, fair dealing for the purposes of criticism, review, quotation… in UK law permits lecturers to provide a quotation from a copyright work (whether for criticism or review or otherwise) in material they distribute to their students, provided the following conditions are met:

  • the quotation or extract or passage must be from a published work
  • the quotation or extract or passage must be a directly relevant to and part of a substantial and considered criticism or review of the work and not used merely for illustration
  • the criticism or review must directly accompany the quotation, extract or passage from the work being criticised or reviewed, e.g. on the same or immediately preceding or following PowerPoint slide or page
  • the author/creator and title of the source work must be provided, unless it is impractical to do so. 

Journal articles and book chapters (the University’s CLA Licence)

The University holds a Copyright Licensing Agency (CLA) Higher Education Licence, which permits lecturers and course administrators to provide each student on a course of study with photocopies or digital copies of journal articles or book chapters from University or College Library collections.  There are conditions and a procedure to follow, set out in the next FAQ "I have come across a journal article/chapter of a book...?".

Recorded television and radio broadcasts (the University’s Educational Recording Agency (ERA) Licence)

The University’s ERA Licence permits the recording of television and radio programmes, the playing of those recordings to students and making the recordings available in a password-protected intranet such as Moodle/VLE for student use, as long as the following conditions are met:

  • Recordings must be for non-commercial educational purposes only
  • Recordings must not be edited or modified, although extracts may be used
  • Recordings must be marked/labelled with the date of the broadcast/recording, the title of the programme, the name of the broadcaster, and the following statement: ‘This recording is to be used only for educational and non-commercial purposes under the terms of the ERA Licence.’
  • Copies may be made of the broadcast recording, but not of videos and DVDs sold commercially
  • Recordings of broadcasts or extracts thereof may not be incorporated into any commercial video or DVD or other production, nor may they be sold.

ERA Licence conditions are available at: www.era.org.uk .

Links to websites, including YouTube and other videos

You may provide a link to any publicly accessible page of any website, including links to the URLs of YouTube videos and other material legally available on the Internet, unless you suspect that the material posted on the site is infringing or otherwise unlawful.

Out-of-copyright material

If copyright no longer subsists in a work, it is said to be in the ‘public domain’ and no permission is required to copy or use that work or quotations, extracts or excerpts from it, but the source must be acknowledged.

According to UK copyright law, the standard term of copyright is to the end of the calendar year 70 years after the author’s death.  However, the standard term does not always apply, notably for unpublished works that may be in copyright until the end of the calendar year 2039.

Best to consult the following copyright duration charts:
The National Archives copyright duration charts for UK literary, artistic, dramatic and musical works , look for “flowcharts for Crown copyright and non-Crown copyright”;
The Intellectual Property Office (IPO) UK copyright duration information for sound recordings, films and the typographical arrangements of published literary, dramatic or musical works .

The University holds a Copyright Licensing Agency (CLA) Higher Education Licence (‘CLA Licence’), which permits photocopies or scans or born-digital copies of journal articles and book chapters (‘Digital Copies’) to be distributed to enrolled students in a lecture (photocopies), or by email, or, more usually, by upload to a password-protected restricted intranet such as Moodle for students enrolled on the course for which the Digital Copies are provided.

Only students on the Course of Study for which the scans of book chapters and journal articles are provided are allowed access to and download of those materials.

Study and research groups are not permitted to scan and upload materials under the CLA Licence.

Materials not allowed for scanning under the CLA Licence include printed music and lyrics, maps, charts and newspapers.

Digital Copies should not substitute for the purchase of an original published edition, i.e. text substitution (either print or electronic).

Digital Copies should not be stored, or systematically indexed, with the intention of creating an e-library.

Digital Copies must not be made available on the publicly accessed Internet.

______________________________________________________________________________

If you wish to provide a journal article or extract from a book to your students by email or in Moodle or another restricted intranet at the University, please follow these steps:

  1. Check iDiscover to see if the University or a College Library owns the ‘source edition’ from which the item is to be scanned.

    If not, the item may not be made available for distribution unless a copyright fee-paid copy of the chapter or article is obtained from an organisation that holds a document delivery licence with the CLA, e.g. British Library Document Supply Service .
  2. Check to see whether the particular work is part of the CLA Repertoire and may be scanned and distributed by using the CLA Check Permissions search tool .
     
  3. If the conditions in 1. and 2. are met, the proportion of a book, journal or magazine that may be scanned or copied for each Course of Study is restricted to whichever is the greater of:
  • up to 10% or one chapter of a book (no chapter substitution from the same book or other edition of the same book during the Course of Study)
  • up to 10% or two articles of a journal issue (or, except for any CCC Electronic-Rights Works, where the issue is dedicated to a particular theme, any number of articles dealing with that particular theme)
  • up to 10% or one paper of one set of conference proceedings
  • up to 10% or one report of one case from a book of law reports
  • up to 10% of an anthology of short stories or poems or one short story or one poem of not more than 10 pages.
     
  1. Attach a CLA HE Licence 2024-2027 Copyright Notice to the front of the Digital Copy so it is the first thing students see when they open the document.

    The covering Copyright Notice should have details filled in about the Course of Study the Digital Copy is being released to and the source edition.

    ​If distributing the same materials to two separate courses, attach separate Copyright Notices to each Digital Copy.
  2. Report all this to the CLA Designated Person in your Faculty, Department, etc., often at its Library, who will enter the Digital Copy information on a prescribed CLA Digital Copy Record Form (who will send it to the University’s CLA Licensing Co-ordinator for compilation and submission to the CLA).

    Should you not know who is your Faculty’s or Department’s Designated Person, contact the University’s CLA Licensing Co-ordinator at copyright-help@lib.cam.ac.uk .
     
  3. Now the PDFs may be distributed by email to the students or to the Moodle site or other restricted intranet site limited to the students on the Course of Study for which the Digital Copies are being provided.

Under the statutory permitted act of ‘fair dealing for the purposes of non-commercial research or private study’, University staff and students may make a single copy of a single article from a newspaper for their own personal use.

Also, in lectures and for distribution to students in Moodle to students on a course of study, short extracts from newspapers may be copied and used, relying on the copyright exceptions of ‘fair dealing for the purposes of illustration for instruction’ or ‘fair dealing for the purposes of criticism, review, quotation…’.

Under the University’s ‘Basic Licence’ that the University holds with the Newspaper Licensing Agency (NLA), the collective copyright licensing agency that represents the major UK newspaper groups, from print and digital national newspapers you can photocopy and scan from print, and copy and paste from digital for all opted in titles.  Copies must be kept within the University, but they can be issued to students, either uploaded to Moodle or other VLE or emailed directly to students.  Copies can also be stored/kept as long as necessary for teaching or learning use.

The Basic Licence also covers ‘ad hoc’ copying for media monitoring purposes. So if you happen to come across an article about the University, and wish to copy it for emailing to selected colleagues, this is covered by the Basic Licence.

There are conditions:

  • You need to check that the newspaper in question is covered by the NLA Licence - run the title or URL through the Check Permissions tool to find out.
  • No systematic copying or distribution is allowed, e.g. provision of an aggregator ‘daily e-clippings service’ within or outside a University office/department without payment of NLA ‘frequent copying fees’ (photocopying and/or digital fees).  Fees paid to a Media Monitoring Organisation (MMO) such as Signal or Meltwater or Precise and corresponding NLA fees are the responsibility of the University office incurring those MMO and NLA fees beyond the University's Basic Licence (payment of any additional NLA fees via the Legal Services Division). Tariffs are available from the NLA, more information from the Legal Services Division.
  • Scanning/copying of newspaper articles for ad hoc distribution by electronic means e.g. emailing outside the University or posting on the Internet, is not covered by the University’s NLA Licence; permission for specific uses may be obtained from the appropriate newspaper publisher. 

‘Fair dealing’ with a copyright work for the sole purpose of illustration for instruction, the ‘teaching exception’, permits the copying and display of short extracts or passages from literary and musical works, films, sound recordings and broadcasts as well as artistic works in the setting of examination questions, if certain conditions are met:

  • only a portion of a copyright work that is necessary for the immediate purposes of examination is copied and provided, which will not normally be the whole work
  • copies of extracts of works provided for an examination are limited to those students being examined
  • original sources are cited.

To ensure compliance with data protection and copyright law, your Faculty or Department needs to write to the students to request Faculty use of their scripts in this way.  Written permission needs to be secured, any Consent Form to include the following terms:  the student agrees that their permission is subject to his or her name and any means of identification being removed from the scripts and the scripts to be transcribed so that hand-writing cannot be identified; the scripts may be accompanied by a brief statement regarding grading; no scripts shall be made available until the opportunity for appeals is over for the examination cycle from which the scripts is from; the University is under no obligation to use the scripts as example works.

Each Faculty will have its own way of administering such a permissions regime, but the above-noted provisions for obtaining permission are set out in a template Consent Form for Use of Examination Scripts.

 

There is, yes.  Moodle is a password-protected restricted intranet and copyright material prepared for and made available to a specific cohort of students on a specific course of study should only be accessible by those students enrolled on that a particular course.   On the other hand, a public website is made available to and is accessible by the whole world.   

Many of the copyright exceptions such as ‘fair dealing’ (notably, for ‘illustration for instruction’) and licences such as the CLA Licence that allow copies of materials such as journal articles and chapters form books to be made available to students in lectures and in Moodle/VLE are unavailable or contractually prohibit wider distribution of the same material, especially on the open Internet.  

Also, many of the University's electronic resources subscriptions permit journal articles and other materials to be posted only in restricted course management systems such as Moodle/VLE, but not on the open Internet.

Unless you are the sole owner and copyright owner of the material, generally, you are not permitted to post copyright-protected course materials openly on the Internet without permission from the copyright owners of the material.  Posting materials online constitutes republishing or distributing the materials and only the copyright holders have the right to authorise those ‘restricted acts’.  

Works released by open access licences such as Creative Commons (CC) Licences may be shared openly on the Internet provided you attribute the copyright owner and adhere to prescribed CC Licence terms.

Copyright ownership of lecture notes/teaching material

Regulation 7 of the University’s Intellectual Property Rights (IPR) Policy:

Copyright and related rights in material created by a University staff member in the course of their employment by the University belong to that University staff member.  This means that University staff members own the copyright in their original teaching materials, including the lecture notes they author for teaching purposes at the University.   

In other words, the underlying copyrights of the lecturer, in their own original material included in their lecture, remain with the lecturer.   Copyrights in extracts of others’ (third party) copyright material included by a lecturer in their lecture remain with the materials’ respective copyright owners.

 

Licence for the University to use lecture notes/teaching material

Regulation 30 of the IPR Policy:

“In relation to teaching materials prepared by a University staff member for use in the teaching primarily of the University’s students, unless the Faculty Board or other body responsible for teaching has agreed explicitly to the contrary, the University shall have a non-exclusive, royalty-free, perpetual licence to use the material for teaching at the University.”

 

Regulation 8 of the University’s Intellectual Property Rights (IPR) Policy :

8. … [T]he University shall own copyright, database rights, and other unregistered rights arising from the activities of University staff in the course of their employment by the University in (a) subject matter created for the administrative or managerial purposes of the University, including advice to students other than teaching materials; (b) subject matter such as examination papers and library catalogues; and (c) any other subject matter commissioned by the University, such as special reports on its policy or management…[emphasis added]

Statutes and Ordinances of the University of Cambridge, Intellectual Property Rights.  https://www.admin.cam.ac.uk/univ/so/pdfs/2021/ordinance13.pdf

Retention of examination data, including General Board guidance on examinations data and scripts, Education Quality and Policy Office.

1.  Include a copyright notice on your lecture notes and teaching material

Although not required to assert copyright in original works, the traditional copyright symbol © and author assertion of copyright provides a form of notice of copyright ownership:

Copyright © [year(s) of creation] [name of author], and others as identified. All rights reserved.

[If you have no issue with students releasing your original lecture material online and wish to release your material under one of the Creative Commons (CC) Licences described at https://creativecommons.org/licenses/ , replace ‘All rights reserved’ with the specific CC Licence identifier].

 

2.  Include a general copyright material warning notice

To be used by lecturers at the start of lectures to serve as a reminder to students not to make unauthorised copies or to distribute their material.  This statement can be used independently or in conjunction with information provided as part of the University’s lecture capture service, where applicable.

Students are notified that lecture content is copyrighted material, owned by [lecturer name], who retains copyright in lecturer-authored content.  There may also be third parties who own copyright in material which may be included in the content. 

Copies may not be made without the formal consent of [lecturer name] and third parties (as applicable); this includes audio recordings of the lecture as well as all accompanying material, presented both during, in advance of and following the lecture.  Students recording for reasonable adjustments are welcome to do so, and are reminded that the terms of their signed agreement to record apply. 

Failure to comply with the terms of this warning may result in disciplinary action by the University and legal claims for copyright infringement. 

 

3. Fully cite any third party material you may have included in your course material, to make it clear that the material so marked is not your own work and may not be redistributed without further permission from copyright owners.

Under the University’s IPR Policy, in Regulation 7, University lecturers own the copyright in original material they author for teaching purposes at the University, including their lecture notes.

Student-created, non-verbatim notes of lectures may be shared by the student who takes the notes, as long as the notes are created in their own words.

However, if your teaching materials that you find posted online and/or are being sold are verbatim transcripts or direct copies of your lecture notes/teaching material, you may send a takedown notice to the seller or site making the material available without your permission to be removed from online access and/or sale.

Ownership of lecture notes and teaching material - Protection from unauthorised use outlines some of the ways to assert ownership of your teaching materials and guidance on pursuing remedial action against infringers of your copyright.

Under the University’s Intellectual Property Policy, lecturers own copyright in their original lecture notes and teaching materials, including their PowerPoint presentation slides (but not third party material, i.e. others’ material they may include for the purposes of teaching under statutory copyright exceptions or licence).  This means that students should not record lectures or share teaching materials with others or upload teaching materials online without the lecturer’s permission.  

However, student-created, non-verbatim notes of lectures may be shared by the student who takes the notes, as long as the notes are created in their own words.  Students also have users' rights under statutory copyright exceptions such as fair dealing for the purposes of private study and non-commercial research to copy extracts from teaching materials for their own use.

Disabled students have a right to record lectures as a reasonable adjustment under their Student Support Document (SSD), provided they comply with the procedure provided by the University’s Accessibility and Disability Resource Centre.

Lecturers are obliged to permit a student to record if this is recommended in the student’s SSD.

The University’s centrally managed Lecture Capture service aims to provide an automated system that records lectures and makes them available for watching by students on the course of study for which the lectures were given.

If you retained copyright and have published on your own, you can copy, distribute, adapt, translate, republish and do all the other things protected by copyright. You can also give or withhold permission for others to do these things, at your discretion.

However, if your work has been published commercially, all depends on the agreements that you signed with your publishers.  If you signed copyright over to a publisher or granted them an exclusive licence, then the publisher has been granted the right to allow copies or uses to be made of the work, and you may need to request permission from the publisher to reproduce it.  Publishers often grant back some rights to their authors; check your agreement or contact your publisher to see what rights you may have retained.

For journal articles, your publisher may allow pre-prints or post-prints or re-publishing/re-use after specific embargo periods. Should you not have your publishing agreement to hand, you will need to check with your publisher to confirm any terms that apply to use of the whole or large extracts from your article, i.e. beyond short ‘fair dealing’ quotations.  www.sherpa.ac.uk/romeo/ outlines author re-use permitted by major journal publishers.

In any case, if your previously published material contained extracts from other sources, e.g. figures, illustrations, tables or charts, you may need to obtain permissions from the copyright owners to share or distribute those items.

Further information on publishing agreements, open access:

Cambridge Libraries, LibGuides, Study skills, Copyright for Researchers: Authorship and IP

Office of Scholarly Communication

Research Gate and Academia.edu are commercial networking sites that encourage researchers to upload and share their research papers, but they are not institutional digital research output repositories such as the University’s Apollo Repository. 

If you are thinking of using papers from ResearchGate and Academia.com, some content on these sites is legally shared, e.g. preprint versions of articles for which the author holds copyright, or material licensed by one of the Creative Commons Licences, but not all papers may have been uploaded with the permission of publishers and copyright owners.   

The alternative is to obtain the published papers from the Library or search institutional repositories for a copy that has been posted by its author by using Open Access Button or unpaywall .

Always double-check the licensing conditions of individual items, and always provide attribution (and licence terms if CC-licensed) when reusing any image.

The General Medical Council's (GMC) guidance on ‘Making and using visual and audio recordings of patients’ sets out the following general rule regarding use or disclosure of recordings such as audio recordings, photographs, and other visual images of patients “for purposes such as teaching, training or assessment of healthcare professionals and students”:

Disclosure or use of recordings from which patients may be identifiable may be used only with consent.  The disclosure or use of recordings used with consent must ensure that the disclosure is not outside the scope of the original consent.

In more detail, the GMC advises that recordings may be used or disclosed for teaching purposes under the following conditions:

  1. patient consent has been given and the recordings have been anonymised or coded, i.e. pseudonymised information, prior to teaching use;
  2. the following recordings may be used without patient consent provided the recordings are anonymised - images of internal organs or structures, images of pathology slides (not the actual pathology slides containing human tissue), laparoscopic and endoscopic images, recordings of organ functions, ultrasound images and x-rays;
  3. for recordings made before 1997 –
    recordings that have been effectively anonymised may be used;
    recordings where the patient is identifiable may be used only if you have a record that consent was obtained for the recording to be made or used;
  4. Express consent must be sought for any form of publication, or for use outside the teaching setting.

More information of informed consent and use of patient records and images in teaching:

Joint Information Systems Committee (JISC)/University of Bristol, Making and using clinical and healthcare patient recordings for learning and teaching
Institute of Medical Illustrators, Legal and Ethical

Citing copyright-protected material

Follow the citation guidelines for your field or discipline, e.g. APA, Harvard, Chicago, MHRA. Cambridge Libraries, LibGuides, Study Skills, Reference Management provides referencing advice.

In any case, cite at least the source of the material, e.g., the book title, journal title, article title, and if another type of copyright work, the name of the author/creator of the material.

For works from the Internet, including images, the source cited should include at least the URL, i.e., the web address, from where the content was retrieved and the name of the author/creator if available.

For materials that you are using with permission from the copyright owner, please include a statement something to the effect of “Used with permission from [Name of Copyright Holder]” in addition to attribution of the source, author/creator and title of the work. The copyright owner will mostly likely be the publisher or the author/creator of the work. 

 

Image citations in my PowerPoint slides

Citing images used in PowerPoint slides and other course materials is part of providing “sufficient acknowledgement” of the title and author of a work authors/creators, as required by UK copyright law.

Generally, image citations should meet the same requirements as a text citation, i.e. a reader should be able to find the source of the image, and the image itself, based on the information in the citation.

Citations can be included:

Alongside each image, i.e. above, below or adjacent to the image, on the slide where the image appears, or on an ‘Image Reference List’ slide included in the slide presentation.  Note/number the images so they correspond with those referenced in the image reference list.

If all or most of the images are from the same source, you may include a statement at the start or end of your slides with wording to the effect: “Unless otherwise noted, all images in this presentation are from [source title and author/creator].”

If you include images such as photographs or diagrams that you created and for which you are the copyright holder, you may wish to include an attribution notice, e.g. © [Year image created, Author/Creator name].

 

Citing images from websites, online image databases or licensed image databases

Check the website or licence terms of use, or copyright/permissions section, to determine if the image is available for your intended use and for any information on specific attribution requirements.  If no specific attribution requirements are indicated then, at minimum, the following citation information should be provided:

Author/Creator, title of image, source (i.e., URL to the image webpage OR name of the licensed image database).

Many publication style guides have more specific and detailed requirements for citing images from digital databases. Consult the appropriate style guide for your field or discipline.

When considering using an image from a website, you should establish whether the website owner is the copyright holder, or has permission to use and share that image.  

 

Citing images from print and electronic publications

A citation for an image from a published source requires, at minimum, the author/creator of the image, the image title and the source of the image.  The general format would be:

Author/Creator, title of image, source, e.g. book/book chapter, journal article.

Many publication styles, including APA, Harvard, Chicago, have more specific and detailed requirements for citing images from all manner of print and electronic publications.  Consult the appropriate style guide for your field or discipline.

 

Citing images licensed under Creative Commons Licences

All Creative Commons (CC) Licences require the user to attribute the copyright owner/author/creator of the work being used, but how that attribution can be provided is flexible depending on the type of licence and the medium in which the work is being used.

Detailed guides on attributing CC licensed material:

Marking your work with a CC Licence, Creative Commons wiki

Best practices for attribution, Creative Commons wiki

Attributing CC Materials, Creative Commons Australia

If you are licensing your own work under a Creative Commons Licence, it is likely that the copyright owner of third party material you wish to include in your work will not readily give you permission for their material to be released to the world under the Creative Commons Licence you have chosen for your own work. 

However, if they have given you permission and you have marked their work with the credit line they have prescribed, e.g. “all rights reserved”, to ensure that end-users are aware of any distinction between the permission/licence you have been granted and the terms of the Creative Commons Licence you have chosen to release your work under, your work under a CC Licence should be prefaced with the wording ‘Except where otherwise noted, this work is licensed under a Creative Commons [      ] Licence. 

For the posting of journal articles, www.sherpa.ac.uk/romeo/ sets out re-uses that journal publishers permit their authors to exercise, including upload to institutional websites and repositories.  Many publishers do not allow PDF versions to be used, but may allow pre-prints or post-prints or re-publishing/re-use after specific embargo periods.  Some open access articles, e.g. those licensed/released under a Creative Commons Attribution (BY) Licence, may allow for immediate re-posting without permission.

Book chapters pose more of a problem. Your faculty will need to check their publishing agreements to see whether the terms permit reproduction of a limited extract from their books on an institutional website.

Without checking publishing terms to confirm whether or not upload or posting of a publication is permitted, there are no exemptions/defences to copyright infringement in UK copyright law that permit the upload or posting of content from journal articles or books to the Internet without the permission of copyright owners, usually publishers.  The University’s Licence with the Copyright Licensing Agency (CLA) does not allow for the upload of print or e-versions of journal articles or books to websites and social media.