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Got In-Copyright Content?

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The Biodiversity Heritage Library’s collection of in-copyright titles continues to grow. Besides including, where possible, the in-copyright publications produced by our consortium library partners, we also digitize copyrighted titles by permission from the organizations or authors who generously sign our standard license agreement.

We are very pleased to announce the recent acquisition of permission from the Bombay Natural History Society, the Entomological Society of British Columbia, the Flemish Entomological Society and the Hungarian Geological Society to provide their publications for free and open access. To date we have agreements with over 160 licensors to provide 390 in-copyright titles in our collection. Since the start of 2015, we have received permission to include or continue the digitization of:

Stay tuned for more to come! All in-copyright content in BHL is assigned a Creative Commons Attribution-NonCommercial-ShareAlike 4.0 (CC BY-NC-SA 4.0) license meaning that anyone is free to “use, reproduce, supplement, modify, create derivatives, and otherwise use the title(s), for any and all non-commercial purposes, with proper attribution to the licensor as the source.” In short, you can reuse the in-copyright content as long as it’s not for commercial reasons, you attribute the copyright holder, and apply the same license on your own creation.

While the majority of BHL’s collection revolves around “legacy” materials, meaning titles in the public domain in the United States (because well, it’s easier to digitize materials without having to broker permission first), we are doing our best to increase the inclusion of in-copyright materials where possible.

Do you hold copyright to a title that you think should be in the BHL collection? If so, please see more information about our permissions process via http://biodivlib.wikispaces.com/permissions and contact us.

Some highlights from our in-copyright title collection include…

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April 30, 2015
Avatar for Bianca Crowley
Written by

Bianca Crowley is the Digital Collections Manager for the Biodiversity Heritage Library, headquartered at Smithsonian Libraries and Archives. She has spent her career in this role helping consortium Partners grow and curate BHL's collection. Her main responsibilities revolve around program administration and collection management, but you can also find her tackling technical development, documentation, copyright, and cataloging issues as time allows. She received her MSLIS from The Catholic University of America.