All publicly available materials, either in print or in electronic formats, are subject to copyright legislation.
Material produced by NHS England, Office for Health Improvement and Disparities, the UK Health Security Agency and other UK central government departments and agencies is made available under the Open Government Licence, which is the default licence for public sector information produced by Crown bodies, and recommended for other public sector bodies. Material on GOV.UK is Crown copyright and available under the Open Government Licence unless otherwise stated.
UKHSA staff can find information from the UKHSA Publishing page on the intranet. If you are a UKHSA employee and wish to find out about publishing research outputs, visit the UKHSA research support and UKHSA open access pages on the intranet.
Local authorities usually own the copyright to the material they produce. If you have a query relating to the copyright of material produced by your employer/organisation you should seek guidance from your employer.
NHS Licence Plus
UKHSA KLS provides access to copyright materials under the NHS Licence Plus. This is the agreement signed between the Copyright Licensing Agency (CLA) and the Department of Health and Social Care.
The licence gives certain rights and permissions to make limited copies of 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
- collaboration with non-commercial partners in the public and education sectors
- other non-commercial reasons, including journal clubs, media and PR
Please remember
- you will need to pay an additional copyright fee for material required for commercial purposes
- 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)
Text mining, data mining and Artificial Intelligence (AI)
An exception to copyright permits making copies for the use of text and data mining for non-commercial research. NHS Licence Plus grants no rights associated with the training or use of Generative AI tools or Large Language Models (LLMs).
Please contact libraries@kls.ukhsa.gov.uk with any questions.
