As a teacher, you might want to help your students access the required literature as easily as possible. But beware: uploading into Brightspace full PDFs of books and articles in a non-Open Access version is bound by rules.

Use of copyrighted material in the Easy Access Agreement

The Easy Access Agreement (EAR in Dutch) regulates the reuse of third-party copyrighted material and its remuneration. The EAR is an agreement between the UvO Foundation and UNL under which the university and faculties pay an annual fee to buy off reuse. Briefly, the rules for reuse are as follows:

The UvO Foundation distinguishes between short extracts, medium extracts and long extracts. Short and medium extracts fall under the Easy Access Arrangement, long extracts do not. The page rate of medium extracts is higher than that of short extracts.

• A short extract is 8,000 words for an article and 10,000 words for part of a book. Translated into pages we use a limit of 25 pages for a short extract.
• A medium extract is more than 8,000 words for an article. For a book of 200 pages or more, the limit for a medium extract is 40 pages. The limit of 40 pages is new; this used to be 50 pages.
• For a book of less than 200 pages, this limit is 20% of the total number of pages. The limit of 20% is new; this used to be 25%.

A detailed explanation of the EAR can be found on the Leiden University Libraries website.

Alternatives for using extracts

We recommend avoiding using extracts as much as possible by linking to the literature. Several alternatives are available for this:

• For students, linking directly to the publication platform is easiest. By adding the UBL proxy, students can log in directly with their ULCN and view and, if possible, download the publication in question. This requires that the publication have a persistent link, such as a DOI or a handle.
• If a publication does not have a persistent link, linking to the desired article, chapter or ebook in the catalogue is an alternative that still allows students to access the desired material.
• A final alternative is a (digital) course reserve. This service from the library allows you as a teacher to put all the literature students need to read for the course together in one place. For books and journals that are not available digitally this is a physical shelf in the library (location of your choice FSW or Wijnhaven), for the digital publications this is a link to the item in the catalog.