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 our content is protected by copyright. If you’re interested in republishing or reusing it in other ways:
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. (Search results within the site can also be restricted to display only those publications with Creative Commons licenses via the “Reuse License” facet.) 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:
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 our Code of Conduct 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.
- Contact the copyright holder (see below) for permission if there is no Creative Commons license and your 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 cannot give it to you.
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.