Library Website: Services: Electronic Resources Usage Policy

Licenses & Use Rights

University Library licenses electronic resources for research and teaching by the KAUST community. The use of these resources is governed by copyright restrictions and by contract licenses between KAUST and the e-resource provider. Your use rights can differ from license to license, and this Library's Electronic Resources Usage Policy presents the most common usage restrictions. Each user is responsible for complying with copyright restrictions and with this Usage Policy. Failure to do so can result in the loss of access to a resource for the entire KAUST community. KAUST reserves the right to restrict, suspend or revoke an individual user’s access to electronic resources due to failure to comply.

Appropriate Usage

Our licenses generally allow the KAUST community to:

Download and print a reasonable amount of work for educational or scholarly purposes.
Share content with other KAUST community members.

Inappropriate Usage

Our licenses generally prohibit:

Providing access to anyone other than KAUST community members.
Downloading or printing entire issues of online journals or major portions of electronic books.
Using software or other automated tools to systematically download substantial quantities of licensed content.
Using licensed resources for commercial purposes.

Downloading via Endnote

When using the "Find Full Text" feature in Endnote, ensure that you are not downloading PDFs in large batches.
Downloading large batches of pdf articles from the same e-journal or same publisher could potentially trigger a chain of events that may cause access to that particular electronic resources to be affected.

Examples

Appropriate Use	Inappropriate Use
viewing, downloading, copying, printing, and/or saving search results, individual articles, or a single book chapter.	downloading several chapters of a book, more than half of the content from an issue of a journal, or a large number of records from a database in a short period of time. using automated tools such as a robot or spider to automatically search, retrieve, and locally store information from web-based resources.
emailing an article to faculty, staff, or a student of KAUST or its affiliates.	distributing an article to users who are not affiliated with KAUST.
providing a link to an article or book chapter on a publicly available website. restricting access to an article or book chapter using the "Blackboard" course reserve system.	posting a copy or sharing an account to an article, book, or multimedia resource on a website, electronic distribution list, forum, etc that is available to the public.
using e-resources in support of scientific research and teaching.	using e-resources for commercial gain including reselling, redistributing or republishing licensed content.

Consequences

From the Publisher:

Publishers have systems in place to note any actions perceived as excessive and/or systematic downloading. If such an incident occurs, it will trigger an automated chain of events that leads to denying access to their content until we can investigate the source of the problem and assure the publisher we have resolved the issue to the publisher's satisfaction.

From KAUST Library:

KAUST Library reserves the right to restrict, suspend or revoke any users’ access to our subscribed electronic resources should he/she be found guilty of non-compliance to this policy.

It is important for all KAUST users to abide by the usage policy as it takes time to negotiate and recover our access with the electronic publishers, and loss of access affects everyone in our community.

If you have any questions, please contact KAUST Library.