Guide for course material (readings)

Before you start: Remember help is available

Consider Course Reserves

We encourage the use of course reserves to make your course material available to students. Benefits of using course reserves include:

  • Copyright for course materials is cleared on your behalf
  • Persistent links are created for e-journal articles and e-books
  • Course reserves list can be cloned for future terms or imported from previous courses

You can learn more on the Course Reserves page or by asking questions to Library staff at library.reserves@uwaterloo.ca.

About this guide

This guide will help you think through copyright considerations as you select and distribute reading material for your course (i.e. articles, book chapters, or PDFs from the Internet). Throughout this guide, the term “course materials” will be used to refer to various types of course readings.

If you are using audiovisual material or sharing your lecture material with your students asynchronously, check out our other guides:

This guide assumes:

  • You have a lawful copy of the material (i.e. you are not using a pirated copy, such as a copy from LibGen or SciHub)
  • You are only providing access to students in your class, such as on a learning management system (e.g. LEARN)
    • If you are creating an open (freely available) course this guide does not apply. Please reach out to copyright@uwaterloo.ca for guidance
  • You are using the material for educational purposes (i.e. not for entertainment purposes)

First, where did you get the content?

The options available to use an article depend on where you retrieved it. For example, you may have scanned it from a print copy, downloaded it from a journal website, or created a PDF from a web page. In general, print materials are less restricted than digital versions; digital versions are usually restricted by license terms or a website’s terms and conditions. In all cases, you must have a lawful copy of the material.

For this reason, this guide is split into three sections:

  • Online or digital – you downloaded the work from a website
  • Print – you scanned or photocopied the work
  • Special cases - your own work, student work, and public domain works
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Remember that free to view/read does not mean free to use. Content that is free to read is still protected by copyright (and may be protected by a license or terms of use). A copyright assessment is necessary to determine whether you can use it in your teaching.

Online or digital course materials

Library-licensed

If you have access to an electronic version of a journal article, proceeding, or book chapter directly from the publisher's website or from an academic database, its use will be restricted by the Library license that applies to the item. 

To find the license terms, use the Finding usage rights page instructions. License terms are listed in Omni, the library catalogue.  The license summary simply shows whether you can use the content. You still need to adhere to fair dealing amounts to guide your use of 'how much' content, for example, one chapter or up to 10% of a book, or one article per issue of a journal.

License terms take precedence over copyright exceptions. If the license terms for the content prohibit use, you cannot rely on Fair Dealing instead to post that article on LEARN.

Examples, Library licensed content
  1. You want to post a copy of the following article to the LEARN site for your course: Lustig, R., Schmidt, L. & Brindis, C. (2012). The toxic truth about sugar. Nature 482, 27–29, doi:10.1038/482027a. The Omni record for the journal Nature shows that the license allows use in LEARN. You can upload the article to your course; keeping in mind that you can only use one article from that issue.
  2. You want to post a copy of the following article to the LEARN site for your course: Choudhury, P. (Nov-Dec 2020). Our work-from-anywhere future: Best practices for all-remote organizations. Harvard Business Review, p 59-67. https://hbr.org/2020/11/our-work-from-anywhere-future. The Omni record for Harvard Business Reviewindicates that this content can’t be used in LEARN. While you can’t use the digital copy from our databases under fair dealing, you could use a scan of print edition; see example 1 under fair dealing below [LINK]. 
  3. You want to post a copy of the following book chapter to the LEARN site for your course: Stamatoudi, I.A. (2001). Video games as a test case. In Copyright and Multimedia Products: A Comparative Analysis. Cambridge University Press, pp 166-185. The Omni record for this book shows that the license allows use in LEARN. You can upload a copy of this chapter to your LEARN site, keeping in mind that you can only use one chapter of this book.
  4. You want to use the following book as the required text for your course: Elliot, P. (1972). The Sociology of the professions. Red Globe Press London, https://doi.org/10.1007/978-1-349-00711-0. You are able to download the entire book as a PDF and you want to upload it to your LEARN site. While the Omni record for this book shows that the upload to LEARN is allowed, you are only able to upload 1 chapter or up to 10% of the book. You can upload this amount if it’s helpful, but it’s likely a better idea to provide your students with a link to the catalogue record or a proxied link (https://proxy.lib.uwaterloo.ca/login?url=https://doi.org/10.1007/978-1-349-00711-0) that will prompt students to login to get access.

Free to view on a website

If you want to use content on a website, such as a blog post or a white paper, you might be able to use Section 30.04 of the Copyright Act. Section 30.04 permits you to copy an entire work that is available on the internet without permission as long as:

  • You are reasonably certain that the copy of the work is a legal copy
  • You do not bypass any technological protection measures.
  • There is no clearly visible notice prohibiting copying on the website.
  • You are providing access to only students registered in the course.
  • You cite the source and provide the name of the creator where available.

Examples, free to view
  1. You want to use the following blog post: School Mental Health Ontario. (2025, March 4). Managing social media fatigue. https://smho-smso.ca/managing-social-media-fatigue/

To make sure students have access, you want to create a PDF of content and upload it to your LEARN site.

  • You are reasonably certain that the copy of the work is a legal copy.
  • You do not bypass any technological protection measures.
    • The site has is not locked down – there is no password protection or other copy protection.
  • There is no clearly visible notice prohibiting copying on the website.
    • There is no prohibition on copying on the post, nor is there a terms of use prohibiting copying.
  • You are providing access to only students registered in the course.
  • You cite the source and provide the name of the creator where available.

You can meet the requirements of Section 30.04, so you could create a PDF copy of the blog content and post it to LEARN.

  1. You want to create a PDF of the following content: Bulger, G. (2023). Physical and mental health benefits of access to outdoor recreation and nature for people with disabilities. Rutgers University: Environmental Analysis & Communications Group. https://cupr.rutgers.edu/products/access-to-nature-for-people-with-disabilities-barriers-challenges-and-opportunities/
  • You are reasonably certain that the copy of the work is a legal copy as the material is posted to the Rutgers website.
  • You do not bypass any technological protection measures.
    • The site has is not locked down – there is no password protection or other copy protection.
  • There is no clearly visible notice prohibiting copying on the website.
  • There is no prohibition on copying on the post, nor is there a terms of use prohibiting copying.
  • You are providing access to only students registered in the course.
  • You cite the source and provide the name of the creator where available.

You can meet the requirements of Section 30.04, so you could create a PDF copy of the blog content and post it to LEARN.

You may also be able to use fair dealing or an open license to make use of website content. See the Open Access with an open license section below or the Fair dealing advisory. 

Open Access with an open license

Publishers/authors/creators may apply an open license, such as a Creative Commons license, to their material. Open licenses are designed to encourage sharing. As with Library licenses, you must still follow the terms of the license.  

As long as you are abiding by the terms of the license (e.g. not adapting content with no-derivatives terms), you can post open access material on a course management site to share with your students.

Examples, Open Access with an open license
  1. You want to upload the following article to LEARN: Ferńandez-Molina, J.C. et al. (2022). Copyright literacy and LIS education: Analysis of its inclusion in the curricula of master’s degree programs. Heliyon, 8(1), https://doi.org/10.1016/j.heliyon.2021.e08707. This article has a Creative Commons Attribution Non-Commercial No-Derivatives license (CC-BY-NC-ND). You can upload this work to LEARN as long as: you use it as originally published and provide attribution.
  2. You want to use the following book with your students: Kucharavy, A. et al. (2024). Large language models in cybersecurity: Threats, exposure and mitigation. Springer. https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-031-54827-7. The book has a Creative Commons Attribution license (CC-BY). This means that as long as you provide attribution you can use the entire book in your course, including posting the PDF in LEARN.
  3. You want to post the following in LEARN: Parsons, J. & Doyle, T. (2023). Accessibility advising in Ontario postsecondary education. eCampusOntario, https://openlibrary.ecampusontario.ca/item-details/#/389e4ad2-8704-49e1-a1b6-1675b96822b7. The article has an Ontario Commons License. Use of this content is restricted to Ontario educators employed by publicly funded institutions for use with students, and requires you to provide a link to the original and retain all copyright notices. You can use this work in your class as long as you follow those restrictions.

Print course materials

The fair dealing advisory provides guidance on how much of a work may be scanned or photocopied for course use in a password protected learning management system (e.g. LEARN). The Advisory contains guidance on how much of a work is considered a “short excerpt”. If you have questions about whether the material you want to use is a short excerpt, please reach out to copyright@uwaterloo.ca.

The general rule is 10% or 1 chapter of a work; the Advisory provides further guidance for different kinds of works like articles in periodicals (journals/magazines), poems, photographs, music, and encyclopedias.

Examples, print course material
  1. You want to post a scan of the below article to the LEARN site for your course: Choudhury, P. (Nov-Dec 2020). Our work-from-anywhere future: Best practices for all-remote organizations. Harvard Business Review, p 59-67. The Library has print copies of Harvard Business Review on the 3rd floor of Dana Porter Libraryincluding the November-December 2020 issue. The fair dealing advisory permits the use of up to 1 article per issue of a periodical. You can scan a copy of this article for your class, keeping in mind that you can only use 1 article from this November-December 2020 issue. 
  2. You have a copy of the following textbook, and want to post a scan on LEARN: Miller, S. & Tupper, T.A. (2023). Animal taxonomy, phylogeny, and organization. In Zoology (12th Ed.). McGraw-Hill. The fair dealing advisory permits you to scan up to 10% or 1 chapter of a work. You can use a scan of one chapter of this book as a post on LEARN for your students.

Tip! If you request this content through Course Reserves, Library staff will a) do the copyright assessment for you and b) scan the material.

Special cases

Your own publications

The copyright considerations for making your own published work available to your students depend on how you published your work. If you published open access and it is available under a Creative Commons license you can follow the guidance under Open Access with an open license above. 

If you published in a subscription journal, you likely transferred copyright to the publisher. This means that you will need to check your publishing contract, the self-archiving page on the publisher website, or the terms for your journal on Open Policy Finder to see what version of your article you can make available.

Examples, your own published content
  1. You published a paper in Lecture Notes in Computer Science and you want to upload it to LEARN to share with your class. Section 3d(ii) of the SpringerNature licence to publish for proceedings papers states that you can use the Version of Record (the final PDF version) “for the purpose of course teaching (but not for inclusion in course pack material for onward sale by libraries and institutions)”. You could upload the paper to LEARN under this provision.
  2. You published an article in Physical Review D and you want to upload it to Perusall to share with your class. The Terms and conditions associated with the American Physical Society Transfer of Copyright Agreement state that authors can “make copies of all or part of the Article, including the APS-prepared version without revision or modification, for the author(s)’ and/or the employer’s use for educational or research purposes.” You could post your article on Perusall under this provision.

If you are unsure how to find or interpret your publishing agreement, reach out to copyright@uwaterloo.ca for help.

Tip: UWSpace is UWaterloo’s institutional repository and can be used to make articles open access and centralize the work produced by UWaterloo scholars. Reach out to uwspace@uwaterloo.ca if you would like to deposit your research to UWSpace which can also aid in connecting students with your work.

Student work

You may want to use copies of student work as exemplars for your class, that you post on LEARN or another course management system.

Under Policy 73 – Intellectual Property Rights, students own the copyright in the work they create during their studies, including their test responses, papers, and presentations. The University does have the right to make copies of student work for academic purposes, but this right does not extend to making the work available online.

It is recommended to ask your students in advance whether they consent to having their work posted online on a course management system. Keep records of the consent you receive; for more guidance see FAQ 15: Do I need to keep records for the copyrighted materials I use?

Public domain

If you are using public domain content (content where copyright has expired, generally where the author has been dead for more than 70 years) there are no copyright restrictions on sharing the materials with your class. More information about the public domain is available in FAQ 04: How do I know if something is in the public domain?.

Please note that there are many reproductions of public domain work that include new additions like introductions, notes, and annotations. This additional content is still protected under copyright, so you will need to redact it from any copies of the material that you make available to your students.

Examples, public domain content
  1. You want to post the three chapters of On being Canadian by Vincent Massey on LEARN. The Library has a copy. Vincent Massey died in 1967 and his works entered the public domain on January 1, 2018. You can use the full three chapters.
  2. You want to upload Anatomy of the human body (21st edition, 1924) by Henry Gray and Warren H. Lewis to LEARN. A version is available on the Internet Archive. Henry Gray died in 1861 and Warren Lewis died in 1964, so the work entered the public domain on January 1, 2015. You could download the PDF and upload it to LEARN.