"Fair Use" and Student Document Retrieval

At my university librarians instruct students and faculty on how to obtain articles from databases. Upon request, librarians suse tools within the databases to provide permanent links to specific database articles. However, unless the university has contracted with the publisher/copyrightholder, the university does not provided PDFs of the articles themselves to groups students. A major reason for this is the limited nature of the legal concept of fair use. The university's purchase of database access allows faculty and students to print documents for their own scholarly use, but the purchase does not include the right for one individual (or a library staff member) to distribute hundreds of copies of an article. An additional contract with the publisher is required to distribute an article to an entire class.

Widespread distribution of article PDFs is the premise of many e-reserve systems. If the library distributes multiple copies of the same article PDF, the library needs to have a contract with the copyright holders, or it runs the risk of a lawsuit.

-DD