Use of Licensed Databases

Databases provided by Portland State University Library are intended for noncommercial, educational, or personal research purposes only. Commercial use of licensed materials is prohibited. Violation of this prohibition can result in loss of access for the entire campus. When using licensed electronic resources, users must:
  • limit uses to non-commercial, educational, or personal research purposes
  • not compile data/information found in a licensed resource into a separate database for public use
  • not facilitate unauthorized access by others (i.e., do not share your Portland State Odin account password with others)
  • not engage in systematic downloading of licensed content (e.g., downloading entire issues of electronic journals or large-scale downloading from databases to create other collections of data)
  • comply with license terms associated with specific resources (note: in many cases, license agreements impose greater restrictions on use than does copyright law)
  • not distribute copies of material to individuals or groups outside the Portland State community, unless the license for the resource specifically allows it;
  • not share client software used to search licensed resources with individuals or groups outside the Portland State community
  • give proper attribution when quoting from material
Notes to faculty:
  1. Many licenses restrict the downloading and posting of licensed content on another server, even for use in course-related Web sites or course reserves systems. In general, it is preferable to use persistent links to the electronic articles rather than to download and store articles on servers.
  2. Most content providers consider data-mining or auto-crawling of their content as an inappropriate use. If you are planning a project that requires data-mining or auto-crawling any library database, please contact your library liaison to obtain permission before starting such activity.
Please contact us at LIB-WERM-Group@pdx.edu if you have questions about this policy or about specific databases.