Portland State Library Policy: Use of Licensed Databases

Databases provided by Portland State Library are intended for non-commercial, 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 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;
and give proper attribution when quoting from material.

Note to faculty: Many licenses prohibit 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 instead (using an appropriate authentication mechanism) rather than to download and store articles on servers. See information about creating persistent links to articles in Library databases.

Please contact us at libdatabases@lists.pdx.edu if you have questions about this policy or about specific databases.