Copyright and legal

All members of the University are bound to abide by the law of the land and copyright is no exception. It is a quite a complex area of law and it applies to the vast majority of materials used and created by members of the University, staff and students alike. We work with the following committees, agencies and online resources to ensure that we all adhere to copyright and plagiarism legislation.

Joint Information Systems Committee (JISC)Collections
JISC Collections manages licences for online resources on behalf of further education and higher education and the research councils.

Joint Information Systems Committee (JISC) Legal
JISC Legal is a free information and enquiry service offering legal information and advice to the further education and higher education sectors on the use of information and communications technologies.

Copyright Licensing Agency (CLA)
The CLA is owned by its members, the Authors' Licensing and Collecting Society (ALCS) and the Publishers' Licensing Society (PLS) and is a Reproduction Rights Organisation that licenses organisations for photocopying and scanning from magazines, books and journals.

It also pays artists, authors and publishers (via ALCS, DACS and PLS) their shares of the fees for such copying.

Turnitin (resources for preventing the spread of internet plagiarism)
Turnitin uses a search engine to scan students’ work against current and archived work on the internet. It also scans students' work against papers previously submitted to Turnitin, and against commercial databases of journal articles and periodicals. Turnitin contains a range of reporting functions and resources. The University subscribes to this service and more information is available from Jackie Brown in the Library and Learning Resources Team.

For specific enquiries you are welcome to contact the Copyright Adviser directly.