Finding relevant course material online can be quick and easy, but it can be much more difficult to assess whether or not you may share this material with your students. The main rules are:

You are permitted to link directly to e-articles and e-books

Linking directly to journal articles, newspaper articles and e-books is permitted when the content has been made freely available legally or AU Library has purchased access to the material. See how you can ensure that your links also work from home.

Uploading articles and book chapters to Brightspace is sometimes permitted

If you have downloaded material from a database, an e-journal or an e-book that you only have access to because you are employed at AU, then it is AU Library's licence agreement with the relevant publisher which determines what you are permitted to do with the material:

• You may not e-mail the material
• You may not share material via social media, file sharing services or open access websites (Facebook, Dropbox, AU's website, etc.)
• You may share material via Brightspace, if the licence permits. See how you can easily check what the license agreements allows.

Danish newspaper databases

You are not allowed to share newspaper articles from Mediestream (Danish articles older than 100 years) or Infomedia (Danish articles from the 1990s onwards) digitally. You are allowed to link to content in the databases, however. 

Please make sure that links to Infomedia content contain both the library proxylink and the article’s 8-character Infomedia ID number. Eg.: https://apps-infomedia-dk.ez.statsbiblioteket.dk:12048/MedieArkiv/link?articles=e821708c

We recommend that you access Infomedia through the library system, before you copy the direct link to the article. 

Free material on the Internet is also protected by copyright

Freely available material on the Internet, e.g. websites, newspaper articles, reports or Open Access articles, is also protected by copyright. You may, however, share such material with your students if the rights holder has clearly stated that file sharing is permitted via a Creative Commons license or via a note in the document, or on the website.

In addition Aarhus University's Copydan agreement [Copydan Writing] permits the posting of such material on Brightspace, albeit with the following limitations:

• You are permitted to copy (upload) 20% of an item (providing it does not exceed 50 pages), per student per semester.
  • Example:
    The report Social ulighed i Sundhed is freely available on the Danish Health Authority’s website. It is 56 pages long: You are permitted to print or upload 11 pages of the report.

• With webpages the 20% is calculated from the total number of webpages on the website. This might be difficult to determine, but as a rule of thumb, you may print or upload the equivalent to 50 printed pages. 

• For freely accessible newspaper articles the 20% must be calculated from the total number of pages in a year's volume. 

• If the material you would like to share exceeds the Copydan limits, then link to it instead. 

Remember to cite the source

Whether you link to or upload material, always remember to acknowledge the source: Title, author and publisher.