Scenario:
A research group at the University wishes to create a database of full-text research articles. The articles would be drawn from the University library's electronic journal collection, and hard copy print collection whenever e-versions of relevant articles are not available. Since this is for research purposes, is there any problem in doing this?

Response:
Copyrighted journal articles available through licensed electronic resources are subject to the terms of the license agreement between the library and the journal publishers. To understand some of the limitations and restrictions that may be contained in license agreements University users should familiarize themselves with general terms of license agreements. Often these agreements will not allow downloading of content and reposting it to another server. So, creating persistent links to articles, or to the library's licensed source and storing those links in the database would be the way for a study group to proceed.

Scanning hard copy of journal articles for inclusion in the database would be a matter involving either getting permission or four-factor fair use analysis for the use of each article. And, any use of the articles by members of the group should be limited to non-commercial, educational, or personal research purposes. Furthermore access to the database must be restricted to members of the study group only. Such a database should not be made generally available to the Internet user community.