All publicly available materials, either in print or in electronic formats, are subject to copyright legislation.
Material produced by UKHSA is subject to Crown copyright. Material on GOV.UK is Crown copyright and available under the Open Government Licence unless otherwise stated. Please refer to the UKHSA Publishing page on the intranet for more information.
NHS Licence Plus
UKHSA are covered by the NHS Licence Plus. This is the agreement signed between the Copyright Licensing Agency (CLA) and the Department of Health and Social Care for the NHS in England and several other organisations, including UKHSA.
The licence gives certain rights and permissions to make limited copies from materials that have been purchased by the organisation, for example, articles from print and online journals to which the UKHSA subscribes or books that have been bought by UKHSA.
It does not cover copying from your own personal subscriptions unless you have donated these permanently to the library.
The licence covers
- photocopying
- scanning a paper copy to PDF
- copying of digital content, for example from an online journal
You may copy for the following reasons
- private study
- non-commercial research
- other non-commercial reasons, including journal clubs, media and PR
Please remember
- material required for commercial purposes will need to pay an additional copyright fee
- PDFs obtained under the NHS Licence Plus should not be placed on a publicly available website
- you can only use material obtained within UKHSA for UKHSA-related work
You may copy the following amounts
- either 5 per cent or a single chapter of a book, whichever is the greater
- up to 2 articles from any single issue of a journal or, where the issue or a substantial part of it is dedicated to a particular theme, any number of articles dealing with that particular theme
- up to 2 letters per issue of a journal – letters should be treated as an article
You may not copy
- articles excluded from the licence (use the CLA’s Check Permissions search tool)
- images or multimedia (unless you have written permission)
Please contact libraries@kls.ukhsa.gov.uk with any questions.
