MEDEV

School of Medical Sciences Education Development

When you find a resource that you want to use in teaching, and there is no licence (such as CC http://creativecommons.org/licenses/) available (see other FAQs in this series), you need to write to the copyright owner to ask for their permission to use their resource. You may need to hunt for their contact details. You should state everything that you can about the purpose, if it is to embed images or quotations in teaching materials, such as what you want to copy, who the students are (year, course, number); for how long they will use it (months, if it is for more than one year you have to make the same request every year); if you are planning to make a digital copy of it available, and if so, where the resource will be available from.

When you have obtained permission from the copyright owner (an email saying ‘okay’) then use the following attribution ©[date], [name of the copyright holder], [name of the author if known], [licence], [url where the resource was found] and include the words “used with permission”. You are not permitted to add a licence of any sort (such as CC) to material that is presently unlicensed and ‘used with permission’.

Figure 1. Sample permission request letter.

Dear Editors of [Journal or Book name], I am writing to ask if you would permit us to make and upload a copy of the PDF of the paper referred to below within our VLE (bespoke, password access) for the period 01-01-2013 to 31-08-2014 as one of the online resources for our [programme], please? [paper] There are [number] students registered for next semester, and we hoped to start the first strand of the module with recommended reading embedded in the VLE rather than via our library. If you permit it then we will mark the downloadable PDF with the following words (please edit if you would like them to read differently) "Permission has been granted by the Editor of the [Journal or Book] for this PDF to be available to students on the [Programme] via the VLE for educational purposes, please do not copy or further distribute. Firstname Lastname." Your permission would be very greatly appreciated. On behalf of [Firstname Lastname], [Unit Leader].

Other sample request letters can be found on the Web2rights website.