Frequently Asked Questions

Secondary identifiers such as title and publisher are helpful so the more detail you can give us the better, particularly if copying from another photocopy.  If you’re not sure you can email this material to us as we have several tools which can help to identify a publication. 

Most of the revenue we get from our licence holders is redistributed as royalty payments.  Only by collecting data can we ascertain whose work is being copied and how much the rights’ holders should be paid. Academic staff often publish material so, potentially, you could be helping higher education colleagues as well as creators outside the sector. 

There are no penalties for high volume copying of copyright material however many people you are sharing it with.  However, it is important to be aware of what the licence allows you to copy so further details can be found at https://cla.co.uk/higher-education-licence-docs  

During the remote exercise even if you copy something just once you still need to let us know.  A one-off copying event may seem inconsequential but when aggregated with data from other institutions, its value can become very significant.

For ‘born-digital’ content, once a paper printout has been made under the CLA licence, it is subject to the same terms and conditions as a photocopy and should be recorded as part of the data collection.  Please see HE Licence User Guidelines for details.

Whilst usually beyond the scope of your CLA licence, there are occasions when we can make a royalties payment for this type of content, particularly when they appear alongside other published material such as in a journal.  Rather than ask colleagues to check qualifying criteria it may be easier to include all relevant material and anything which is not payable will simply be filtered out when the data is processed. 

Copying of papers for examination use are excluded.  However, if any other use is involved, such as using a paper after the exam in a lecture or course pack, it will need to be included.