Can I upload PDFs of journal articles and book chapters, etc., to my NILE course?

A guide for staff

There are almost no circumstances under which staff should upload journal articles and book chapters, etc., in PDF (or any other format) directly into their NILE courses, as doing so may put the University in breach of the Copyright, Designs and Patents Act 1988, our CLA (Copyright Licensing Agency) Higher Education Licence, and may also put the University in breach of one or both of The Public Sector Bodies Accessibility Regulations 2018 and the Equality Act 2010. This is because a PDF and other similar versions of articles or book chapters will often not be sufficiently accessible, especially for students with reasonable adjustments. And even where PDF versions are sufficiently accessible, in most cases there are more accessible versions of journal articles and book chapters than the PDF versions. Where PDFs contain scanned images of text, these are not accessible at all, and while OCR (Optical Character Recognition) software can be used to turn the scanned text into machine-readable text, the resultant text is rarely free from error and requires considerable checking and editing to make it fully accessible. As with video captions, automatically generated OCR text is deemed not to meet user needs or accessibility requirements until it has been manually checked and confirmed to be fully accurate.

In all cases, if you are considering uploading a journal article or book chapter, or similar, in PDF or any other file format, to your NILE course, please speak to your academic librarian first, as they will be able to provide you with legal copies of the material you need in the most accessible formats available, which can then be linked from your NILE course.

More information about copyright, and about how to get in touch with your academic librarian is available via the links below.