Project:Copyrights

Using material from this site

All text and semantic data on this site (apart from embedded maps, see below) is made available under a Creative Commons Attribution Share Alike licence (CC-BY-SA). This means that you are free to copy, use, adapt, and republish any text or data for any purpose, including commercial use, provided that you acknowledge this site as the source and that if you publish a derivative work, it must be released under exactly the same licence. A link to this site will be sufficient acknowledgement. If the material comes from only one page, it's best to link directly to that page. If it comes from more than one page, a link to the main page of the site will be enough.

Note that some material here is reused from other sources and may be under its own Creative Commons licence or Open Government Licence (OGL). In these cases, the other copyright holders should be acknowledged as well as this site. This applies to pages that have a statement acknowledging copyright, and to pages that represent a manuscript text that has its own copyright and licence conditions stated as part of its metadata.

Because this site's licence now has a Share Alike condition, you must not change the licence conditions of derivative works.

Maps

Embedded maps are from OpenStreetMap. They have their own copyright and licence conditions which you can find by clicking the link in the bottom right corner of each map.

Adding material to this site

In order to be published on this site, text or data must be:

• either released under a valid licence that is compatible with CC-BY-SA. Valid means that it must be licensed by someone who has the legal right to do so. Compatible usually means one of:
  • CC0
  • CC-BY
  • CC-BY-SA
  • OGL
• or free from all possible restrictions. This includes contracts and terms of use as well as intellectual property rights. To meet this condition:
  • copyright and database right must have expired or never subsisted in the first place. This includes new copyrights in a derivative work that includes editorial changes to a work that is out of copyright in its original version.
  • there must not be any claims to own intellectual property in the material, even if these claims are potentially dubious or actually being disputed. We prefer to be cautious in these cases in order to avoid conflict.
  • the material must not be copied from an electronic resource whose terms of use restrict reuse, even if the material itself is out of copyright.
  • there must not be any other contract restricting reuse of the material. This includes agreements with archives for permission to copy physical documents from their holdings.
  • absence of a licence or copyright statement does not imply that a work is free of restrictions.

Linking to other sites

We allow external links to any other sites that publish material legally, even if their conditions do not allow the material to be republished here. If a site's terms of use ban incoming links or say that incoming links require permission, we won't usually link to them even though such terms are not likely to be legally enforceable.

We do not allow links to sites that publish material illegally. This especially means sites such as Sci-Hub, whose main purpose is to share infringing copies of articles. It also includes Academia.edu because some self-archived articles there may breach the authors' publishing contracts and infringe rights that have been exclusively licensed to the publisher. Humanities Commons is a much better place to self-archive articles because it's non-commercial, allows you to reserve all rights, and gives the self-archived version its own DOI.

The Internet Archive is treated on a case by case basis: if a copy published there infringes copyright according to UK law, it must not be linked to from here, but this does not affect links to other Internet Archive material that is out of copyright. (This principle can't be applied to Academia.edu because we can't know the terms of each relevant publishing contract.)

Jurisdiction

This site is hosted in the UK and is governed by UK copyright law. Our policies are based on UK copyright law. Accessing this site or reusing material from it may (or may not) infringe copyright in other jurisdictions.