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Faculty Publishing

What is allowed?

Posting an item to Blackboard does not exempt an instructor from copyright regulations. Therefore, instructors are encouraged to follow copyright "best practices." In order of preference, these include:

  1. Link to your article from a library database (see below for more information)
  2. When all else fails, complete a Fair Use Evaluation, scan your article, and then upload it to Blackboard
  3. Fair use does not allow for repeated use over multiple semesters. For repeated use you will have to contact the publisher and request permission.

Please see the following chart for additional reccomendations:

Item Allowed Not allowed
Web site containing copyrighted material Link to the web site via Blackboard Copying and pasting the information into Blackboard
Copyrighted web image Must be educational in nature; display in Blackboard for one semester Repeated use over multiple semesters
Article from a library database Direct linking to article allowed Copying and pasting the article into Blackboard
Scanned copyrighted image
 Must be educational in nature; display in Blackboard for one semester Repeated use over multiple semesters
Scanned chapter from a book

5% of the total work if in-print, 10% of the total work if out-of-print--allowed for only one semester

 More than the allotted percents or repeated use over multiple semesters
Scanned article from a journal, trade publication, or magazine A single article for one semester Multiple articles from the same publication or repeated use over multiple semesters
Audio files No more than 30 seconds without permission Repeated use over multiple semesters
Video files 10% or three minutes, whichever is less

Repeated use over multiple semesters

(Please note that these are suggested guidelines based on one interpretation of the U.S. Copyright Law. If in doubt, it is always advisable to err on the side of caution and complete a Fair Use Evaluation.)

Persistent Links:

If you copy a database link from your Internet browser into Blackboard, that link will eventually stop working because it is a dynamic, non-static link. To eliminate this problem, most database companies now offer persistent links for their articles. Persistent links (also known as persistent URLs) are stable links that will consistently take students to a particular full-text article in a library database.

Note that to ensure access by off-campus users, all persistent links should include proxy information in the first segment of the URL: http://ezproxy.twu.edu:2048/login?url=