Coursepack Photocopying
Your institution's licence with Access Copyright covers photocopying that is done for use in compilations such as the coursepacks your institution produces as supplemental educational material for a course. When a school compiles and/or sells photocopied material as a coursepack, recordkeeping of the bibliographic information is required. Access Copyright provides your institution with an eLog that outlines the necessary bibliographic information and calculates the royalties owed for the reproduction. These royalties are calculated on a per page basis.
You are not required to report bibliographic information for works in the public domain, where the material was created by the professor and the professor retains copyright or where permission has been obtained from another source (e.g. the publisher directly). Please note that the licence includes copying done in support of educational purposes only. You are not permitted to make coursepacks for use by or sale to another educational institution. For more information, please consult with your institution's administration.
Below are some guidelines regarding what you can and can't copy to include in coursepacks. For more information about coursepack copying, please see our coursepack FAQs for post secondary licensees.
What can you copy?
- Up to 15% of a publication or an entire essay, poem, play, article, or short story. For use of 15% – 25% of a work, you may obtain a clearance code using our Rights Management System (RMS) or by emailing us your clearance code request
- An entire single item of print music from a book or periodical issue containing other kinds of work
- An entire chapter, provided it is 20% or less of a book
- An entire reproduction of an artistic work (including drawing, sculpture, painting, prints, architectural works of art or works of artistic craftsmanship) from a book or periodical
- Special textbook limits apply:
- Maximum of 5% or an entire chapter
- Two author-publisher pairs in five-year span (i.e. coursepacks are not to include more than two excerpts written by the same author AND published by the same publisher in a five-year span)
- 50% of a coursepack may be from textbooks
Works NOT covered by the licence:
- Works on the Exclusions List
- Unpublished works
- Consumable items such as published workbooks, assignment sheets, and tests
- Crown or provincial publications (excluding Quebec)
- Instruction manuals, including teachers' guides
- Sheet music and original artistic works including photographs or prints
- Works published in countries with which Access Copyright does not have a reciprocal agreement
- Works with notices excluding them from copying under a collective licence
To find out more about copying under this licence, please contact Access Copyright at 416-868-1620 (toll-free 1-800-893-5777) or email us.