Guidelines for fair use of e-resources of GCCBA-50: Usage policy:

All electronic resources available through the Library are for academic use only and are governed by license agreements. It is the responsibility of individual users to ensure that e-resources are used for personal, educational and research purposes only. Most of the agreements specify prohibited uses of the licensed content, some of them are listed below:

 Prohibited Uses:

·Systematic or programmatic downloading, retention, and printing are prohibited. For example, you cannot download entire issue of a journal or print out several copies of the same article.

·  Electronic distribution of content is also restricted although the specific restrictions vary from publisher to publisher. It may be permissible to forward an article to another colleague in your own institution by email, however, transmitting an article to someone outside of the institution, or to a large group of recipients, a mailing list, or an electronic bulletin board, is not allowed.

·   You cannot post the PDF of an article on your website. The publishers’ main concern is that people outside of your campus network should not be able to access resources licensed by your institution. However, a researcher can post a pre-print of an article written by him/her.

·    As with any kind of scholarly communication, a researcher can use phrases or quotes from other articles and cite the source of information. However, a researcher is prohibited from using large chunk of information (paragraphs and chapters) from an article or from a chapter in a book.

·  Posting the publisher’s version or PDF of an article to an open class website is prohibited (instead, post the URL to the article which will allow only authorized users access). What Happens if the License is Violated?. Publishers track the use of their electronic resources in terms of number of downloads made by subscribing institution. Misuse, if any, is notified to the subscribing institution with details of kinds of violations and institution is expected to take action. The publisher also suspends the access to e-resource pending suitable action by subscribing institution. The access is stopped not only for journals where license agreement was violated but for all journals by the same publisher.

USAGE GUIDELINES:

· Electronic resources such as e-journals, e-databases, e-books etc. made available by GCCBA  Library are for academic use.

·  These resources can be searched, browsed and material may be downloaded and printed as single copies of articles as is done in the case of printed library  material. Downloading or printing of a complete book or an entire issue or a volume of one or more journals (called systematic downloading) is strictly prohibited.

     · Use of robots, spiders or intelligent agents to access, search and/or systematically download from these resources is also prohibited.

·  Any violation of this policy will result in withdrawal of librar privileges for 2 month or stricter action as deemed suitable, depending upon the magnitude of the offence.

·  Please be aware that systematic downloading will cause the publisher to block access to these resources to the entire community of users @ GCCBA.