Acceptable Use of Library E-resources

The Library have recently been alerted by a couple of publishers to some unacceptable use of their e-journals. Please see our web page about acceptable use.

In particular, note that it is unacceptable to "systematically download, save, or print articles from an e-journal". The following examples are therefore unacceptable:

1. Downloading three entire volumes of the Annual Review of Nutrition
2. Crawling the ScienceDirect site

When publishers detect unacceptable use they will usually block the offending IP address. If the journal is being accessed via EZproxy then this will deny access to all of our users.

If the unacceptable use continues then publishers may block access to the whole University or even cancel our site licence agreement.

Note that CSD's Regulations for the Use of IT Facilities at the University of Liverpool state:

3. All Users of all Systems will:
b. Adhere to the terms and conditions of all licence agreements relating to the Systems which they use

and any user who is in breach of regulations may have their access to computing withdrawn either temporarily or permanently.

Thanks for your co-operation.