Copyright

NHS staff in England may copy and share extracts from most printed and digital work in these ways:

1. CLA Licence Plus

This is the agreement signed between the Copyright Licensing Agency and the Department of Health and Social Care for the NHS in England.

See a summary of the main Licence permissions and the Copying Guidelines poster.

Use the Check Permissions Tool to check whether what you want to copy is covered by the Licence.

2. Copyright Act and Library Privilege

If copies cannot be made under CLA Licence Plus, NHS library staff may supply Library Privilege copies under the terms of the Copyright, Designs and Patents Act of 1988. This includes digital as well as printed works.

If you want to share the copy, or make further copies, and the article cannot be obtained from an NHS library, a copyright fee needs to be paid.  This is a Copyright Fee Paid (CFP) article. 

The following have been prepared by librarians in the NHS Copyright First Responders group:

• Library and inter-library document supply and copyright in the NHS
• NHS CLA Licence and Library Privilege FAQs
• NHS copyright fee paid articles decision tree
• NHS-higher education crossover guidance
• Using copyright materials in presentations and training

Library staff requiring help with copyright-related queries are very welcome to contact the First Responders on [email protected].

3. Copyright, TDM and AI

Copyright exceptions permit text and data mining (TDM) for the purposes of non-commercial research.

'Text and data mining is the use of automated analytical techniques to analyse text and data for patterns, trends and other useful information. Text and data mining usually requires copying of the work to be analysed.'

For example, you could use text mining to identify key themes in a long document. Systematic review products like Rayyan often have text and data mining built in to streamline the review process.​

You must have 'lawful access' to the work, that is you will need to have bought a subscription to the work.   Works bought as part of national core content will be covered.

If you or your organisation are using TDM as part of a commercial project it will need to buy a licence from the Copyright Licencsing Agency.

The NHS CLA Licence does not cover the use of content in training or prompting generative artificial intelligence (AI) models, and there is no non-commercial copyright exception.

The CLA is hoping to be able to offer a licence to cover this use next year.  Currently, you will need to obtain permission or licensing from the publishers of the content you wish to use with generative AI tools. You may need to request permission or licensing on a case by case basis.

Unless you have permission or a licence, do not use generative AI tools to summarise content, including abstracts.