Gladhill Learning Commons FAQ: Copyright

Quick Answer:

With only a few exceptions, most PubMed Central articles are still under copyright, and not in the Public Domain. While the articles are free to access, they can not be downloaded, copied, and distributed without permission. See more at:

https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pmc/about/copyright/ 

Best practice is to link directly to PubMed Central articles in your Blackboard course. Unless an exception is stated, PubMed Central articles used as classroom handouts or in course packets will require permission.

More Detailed Explanation:

While government publications automatically become public domain material, most PubMed Central articles are not considered government documents. While access to the article is available for free in the PubMed Central database, they are still subject to copyright.

Per the PMC Copyright Notice:“All of the material available from the PMC site is provided by the respective publishers or authors. Almost all of it is protected by U.S. and/or foreign copyright laws, even though PMC provides free access to it.”https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pmc/about/copyright/

The exception to this statement are the list of six journals, found at the copyright page link above, that are considered government publications and are in the public domain.

There are also some articles that are part of an Open Access subset and are under creative commons licensing. It is possible to limit your search to that subset in PubMed Central. More information on this subset and limiting your search can be found at the link below:https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pmc/tools/openftlist/