Comply with copyright: UKHSA Knowledge and Library Services
Source: gov.uk (2025-07-27)

All publicly available materials, either in print or in electronic formats, are subject to copyright legislation.

Material produced by NHS England, Office for Health Improvement and Disparities, UK Health Security Agency and other UK central government departments and agencies is made available under the Open Government Licence, which is the default licence for public sector information produced by Crown bodies, and recommended for other public sector bodies. Material on GOV.UK is Crown copyright and available under the Open Government Licence (https://www.nationalarchives.gov.uk/doc/open-government-licence/version/2/) unless otherwise stated.

UKHSA staff can find information from the UKHSA Publishing (https://intranet.ukhsa.gov.uk/sites/ukhsa-publishing-and-branding-home/SitePageModern/46644/ukhsa-publishing) page on the intranet. If you are a UKHSA employee and wish to find out about publishing research outputs, visit the UKHSA research support (https://intranet.ukhsa.gov.uk/sites/public-health-and-science/SitePageModern/45038/research-support-and-governance) and UKHSA open access (https://intranet.ukhsa.gov.uk/sites/research-and-governance/SitePageModern/23263/open-access-oa) pages on the intranet.

Local authorities usually own the copyright to the material they produce. If you have a query relating to the copyright of material produced by your employer or organisation you should seek guidance from your employer.

NHS Licence Plus

UKHSA Knowledge and Library Services (KLS) provides access to copyright materials under the NHS Licence Plus (https://www.cla.co.uk/cla-products/public-sector-licence/nhs-licence/). This is the agreement signed between the Copyright Licensing Agency (CLA) and the Department of Health and Social Care.

The licence gives certain rights and permissions to make limited copies of materials that have been purchased by the organisation.

For example, this can include articles from print and online journals to which the UKHSA subscribes, or books that have been bought by UKHSA.

It does not cover copying from your own personal subscriptions unless you have donated these permanently to the library.

The licence covers:

photocopying

scanning a paper copy to PDF

copying of digital content, for example from an online journal

You may copy for the following reasons:

private study

non-commercial research

collaboration with non-commercial partners in the public and education sectors

other non-commercial reasons, including journal clubs, media and PR

Please remember:

you will need to pay an additional copyright fee for material required for commercial purposes

you should not share PDFs obtained under the NHS Licence Plus on a publicly available website

to ask KLS for a Copyright Fee Paid article if you want to make further copies or share it electronically with colleagues

You may copy the following amounts:

either 5% or a single chapter of a book, whichever is greater

up to 2 articles from any single issue of a journal or, where the issue or a substantial part of it is dedicated to a particular theme, any number of articles dealing with that theme

up to 2 letters per issue of a journal – letters should be treated as an article

You may not copy:

articles excluded from the licence (use the CLA’s Check Permissions search tool (https://cla.co.uk/resources/tools/check-permissions/))

images or multimedia (unless you have written permission)

Text mining, data mining and Artificial Intelligence (AI)

An exception to copyright permits making copies for the use of text and data mining for non-commercial research (https://www.gov.uk/guidance/exceptions-to-copyright#text-and-data-mining-for-non-commercial-research). NHS Licence Plus grants no rights associated with the training or use of Generative AI tools or Large Language Models (LLMs).

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