Sharing copyrighted material with students

Most teaching materials are copyrighted, for instance journal articles and books, but also images and sheet music. How do you share this teaching material with your students without copyright infringement? Read all about it on this page.

You cannot share copyrighted material without permission of the copyright holder, usually the publisher. If you do, it means a breach of copyright and your faculty may be fined.

Sharing copyrighted material

Below you will find several ways of sharing material with your students, ordered by type of material. The first option is the preferred one. If it is not available, use the next option. The following applies to all materials: always mention the source. Also when sharing a link to the material.

Towards 100% open access educational resources

Utrecht University promotes open access and aims at open access publishing of all academic publications. For this reason, we strongly recommend using open access materials in your teaching as much as possible.

Open educational resources

More and more open educational resources become available. Open teaching materials are, similar to open access publications, available for all and may be used free of charge. Is the teaching material you want to share openly available? Please read how to share it with your students.

Easy Access Scheme

The Easy Access Scheme sets out agreements between the Universities of the Netherlands (UNL) and publishers, represented by Stichting UvO (Publishers' Organisation for Educational Licences). The agreements concern the inclusion of certain types of resources in educational materials used within the university. This agreement makes it possible to share material for which no link is available or for which there is no agreement with the publisher. For this, UU pays a fee to the publishers through the UvO Foundation.

Contact

If you have questions about copyright, please contact us via: