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Creating electronic course packs on the SOAS BLE - a brief guide to copyright requirements

Printing collections of photocopied articles and book chapters for your students can be expensive and damaging to the environment. Increasingly students want, and expect, to access course material online. SOAS provides the Bloomsbury Learning Environment (BLE) for this purpose. However, there are limitations on what you are allowed to digitise, and legal reporting requirements. Here’s what you need to do to ensure that the material used in your modules is compliant with the rules.

  1. Identify the texts that you want to use for each of your modules.
  2. Check whether they are covered by the Copyright Licensing Agency’s (CLA) Licence.
    As a rule of thumb, books or journals published in the UK, USA or Canada will be. You should check www.cla.co.uk (hover your cursor over the Licences tab for the relevant links) for more details. If the publication isn’t covered by the CLA licence, see the guidance at the bottom of this page.
  3. Make sure that SOAS owns a copy.
    You can’t scan the text for use in teaching if SOAS doesn’t own it – even if you personally have a copy. Check the Library catalogue.
  4. How big is the text?
    You’re only allowed to scan in one chapter, article or other item in a volume, or 5% -  whichever is greater for each course module (if you will be using the same text for several courses, you need to register this with copyright@soas.ac.uk). If the chapter makes up a large proportion of the book that is unlikely to be allowed. If you want your students to read more than that, you should be asking the Library to order enough copies for students to borrow it rather than scanning it.
  5. You have two options:
    (a) make a request to the Library to digitise the text for you. You do this by completing the academics scanning request online form on the Library's scanning service page. Note that there is a charge for this service.
    (b) scan the item(s) yourself. Before doing this you need to follow the instructions at 6 below.
  6. Only if you will be carrying out the scanning yourself, make sure you do the following before starting to scan the items:
    • submit a completed digitisation registration form to copyright@soas.ac.uk . You provide brief details of your course, and then list the texts you want to scan for that course. You must provide ALL the details requested, including page numbers.
    • if it is the first time you will be scanning a text, you will need to print off and follow the instructions on this registration form.
    • you will receive a cover sheet for each text – normally within 24 hours of your request being made.
    • when you scan the text, make sure that the cover sheet provided is placed at the front of the text, so that it is the first thing that your students will see when they open the document.
    • you can now publish the digitised text to your Moodle module.
  7. You need to do the above everytime you want to scan a new text for adding to a module.
  8. If you are intending to use the same scanned texts as you have used in previous years for the same courses, you just need to send the course codes for the courses you are running, together (if relevant) with details of any texts that you do not wish to continue using (so that they can be removed), to copyright@soas.ac.uk at the start of the academic year. We will then copy the details across to this year's register. You do not have to send us a new form each year for texts that are already registered as long as you inform us in this way that you will be using them again.

Publications not covered by the CLA licence


Sometimes you may want to digitise a text that is not covered by the CLA licence. Reasons why a text may not be covered include:

  • the publication was published in a country not covered by the licence, eg many Asian and African countries;
  • a publisher or author has explicitly said that they don’t want the publication to be scanned;
  • it is a newspaper article – generally speaking you are not allowed to digitise newspaper articles as they are covered by another licence with stricter conditions;
  • the text is from an electronic resource, eg e-journals, pdfs of articles found on the web;
  • it is unpublished (eg archives, manuscripts);
  • it is sheet music or a map;
  • the publication is not covered by copyright as it is too old.


The last of these is not a problem – if it isn’t covered by copyright, you can scan as much as you like (but be sure that it isn’t covered). If a text is available electronically, the best thing to do is to provide a link to the resource so that students can go there themselves. If a publication was published in a country not covered by the licence, or the publisher or author has said that they don’t want the publication to be covered by the licence, you could write to the publisher or author to request permission to reproduce the text for teaching purposes (if they grant permission, make sure that you keep a copy of the correspondence authorising this). If you want to scan an article from a newspaper, consider providing a link to the relevant article online if possible. Seek advice from the source of unpublished material (eg Record Office, archive) – it may be able to authorise publication/explain how to apply for permission to reproduce the document. Copyright law itself provides some provision for teaching, and this may provide alternative justification for digitising texts not covered by the CLA licence. We’ve provided more detailed guidance on this.

The good news if something isn’t covered by the CLA licence is that you don’t need to register your use of the material with copyright@soas.ac.uk – so no forms to fill in!

Last updated September 2012