Copyright at Trent

Copyright guidance for Trent faculty, students and staff

Online Articles

Electronic Resources Terms of Use

The library licenses electronic resources for use by students, faculty and staff including indexes, databases, online journals, ebooks, datasets, and specialized software tools. Access to these resources is governed by contractual agreements with resource providers. These agreements limit access to authorized users. Use of these resources is intended for personal use for the purposes of research, education and private study, and not for commercial purposes.

Permitted Uses

Violations of our license agreements can result in the loss of access to an electronic resource for the entire Trent community. If you are unsure about the permitted uses for a particular resource, please contact library@trentu.ca for assistance.

Generally Allowed

Except when prohibited by the terms of a specific license agreement, the following uses are generally permitted:

  • Access by walk-in users who are not affiliated with Trent University, but who are physically present in the Library.
  • Printing or downloading a single copy of an article for personal use, in accordance with Canadian Copyright law.
  • Using licensed material for research, education, or private study.
  • Sharing a resource with a fellow member of the Trent community.
  • Sharing a persistent link to licensed material.
  • Transmitting short excerpts within Blackboard or a secure network, for educational use by users affiliated with Trent University.
  • Reusing short excerpts with appropriate citation in scholarly work including course assignments.

Generally Not Allowed

  • Off campus or remote access by users not affiliated with Trent University.
  • Substantial printing or systematic downloading of content (e.g. entire journal issues, entire ebooks).
  • Commercial use, selling or distribution of licensed material.
  • Sharing material with others not affiliated with Trent University by any means.
  • Posting or scanning articles or book chapters to personal or publicly available websites.
  • Text and data mining, use of bots or intelligent agents to crawl vendor platforms.
  • Uploading licensed material to third party platforms, including generative AI tools like ChatGPT.
  • Sharing your MyTrent network login credentials with other person or organization.

 

Academic social networking sites

Academic social networking sites may be for-profit platforms, earning revenue from the materials posted to the platform through advertising. Take care to confirm that any material posted on these sites is legally shared by the copyright holder, noting that authors of journal articles often forfeit their copyright under most publishing agreements with journal publishers. In most cases, it is the journal that holds the copyright.

Some common examples of academic social networking sites: 

Before using:

  • Visit the original source of the article, the journal publisher homepage, and check the terms of use
  • Make sure the article is legally uploaded to the website by the copyright holder
  • Do not violate or circumvent any subscriptions or paywalls
  • Cite the source, including the title, author, source and licence (if applicable) for the article is included in your teaching materials
  • Check that there is no clearly visible restriction that prohibits sharing or reuse

Online repositories (eg. ArXiv.org, Institutional)

A digital repository is the technical infrastructure, services, and resources for the storage and management of digital information. These can be for profit or non-profit. They may be specific to an institution or discipline or type of data being stored. They may be Open Access or restricted.

Depending on the type of repository, you may be able to:

  • Share links to articles in the repository
  • Download and share articles to students through Blackboard LMS

Without the permission of copyright holder, you may not:

  • Revise, alter or edit the article or remove any copyright statements
  • Share without proper attribution including the title, author, source and licence (if applicable)

Before using:

  • Check for licence information about the article and/or type of repository for information on permissible uses (Open Access, Creative Commons, restricted, etc.)

If you need more assistance determining your rights to use repositories contact copyright@trentu.ca