Terms of Use and Copyright Information
Adding content to eScholarship
If you are an eScholarship contributor with copyright questions about depositing work, please visit our our Help Center.
Using content found in eScholarship
Materials on eScholarship are free to read and download, by anyone, anywhere in the world, and anyone is welcome to link to them. Generally all of the content on our site is protected by copyright; therefore activities like reproduction, adaptation, or redistribution of that content require compliance with copyright law.
If you’re interested in republishing or reusing something you find in eScholarship:
1. Check for a Creative Commons license. Authors of thousands of items in eScholarship have chosen to encourage broad use of their work by applying a Creative Commons license to it. Look for a Creative Commons badge near the title and author information, or the "rights" field if using the API. If the author has chosen a license, it will specify which kinds of uses (e.g. commercial vs. noncommercial) the author wants to allow. Creative Commons license badges look like this:
2. Consider whether your use is fair use.
Many common scholarly uses, such as including a short quotation, are allowed without permission. You can learn more about fair use at the University of California’s copyright site, or the American Library Association’s Fair Use Evaluator.
Text mining is also often fair use. You are welcome to use eScholarship content for text mining via our public API, so long as you respect the eScholarship API Terms of Use and don’t redistribute the content in a way that infringes copyright. Read more at the UC Berkeley Library’s guide to copyright and text mining.
In June 2024 UC's President Drake and Provost Newman issued a letter about research and reader fair use rights in the use of scholarly literature. In this letter, they argue that research methodologies such as text/data mining and artificial intelligence (AI) can “unlock new insights and findings” and advance the “pace and impact of scholarly research on society.” In alignment with that stance and our ethos as an open access repository, eScholarship facilitates access to content on the site via its API, as described above, and does not generally block web crawling. At the same time, we acknowledge that much is still unknown about AI and its potential impacts, and that the contours of legal use of online content for AI training are still being litigated. Those using content on eScholarship for AI training bear the responsibility for making their own legal and ethical assessments of their activities.
3. Contact the copyright holder (see below) for permission if there is no Creative Commons license and your intended use exceeds fair use.
Who owns the copyright for works in eScholarship?
Authors do not transfer copyright to eScholarship for works that are published or deposited here. If you need permission for republication or other use of a work found on eScholarship, we suggest you contact the copyright owner.
In most cases, the author of the item will be the copyright holder. The item’s description will include the author’s name, but not their contact information. Sometimes the item itself will include contact information, like an email address. If not, you will need to use another source, like the directory at the author’s institution. eScholarship staff are unable to assist in locating or providing contact information that is not already displayed on the site.
Other possible copyright holders include:
The Regents of the University of California, if the copyright was transferred to UC or created by a non-academic employee.
Publishers not affiliated with the University of California, for instance if an author transferred their copyright to a publisher, but still had the rights to post the item in eScholarship.
If you’re not sure, look for a copyright statement on the item, or contact the unit hosting the item.
What if I found something that shouldn’t be in eScholarship?
If you are the copyright owner for a work that you believe has been included in eScholarship improperly, you can send a Digital Millennium Copyright Act takedown request. eScholarship is a service of the California Digital Library, and CDL’s Terms of Use page has additional information about takedown requests.
Members of the UC community can deposit items directly, and we do not monitor their submissions. In rare cases this results in content that is outside the scope of our collection policy. If you’ve found something that seems odd and would like to let us know, you can contact us. Users who repeatedly post inappropriate content may have their accounts disabled.