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Copyright: Copyright Overview & Web Resources

This guide is for Mayo Clinic staff and students who are seeking information on Copyright and Fair Use. The guide contains links to Mayo and web resources.

Statement regarding large language models and library licenses

Many of Mayo Clinic Libraries' vendors specifically forbid their customers from supplying content to large language models (LLMs, such as GPT4, BERT, or T5) from the publications for which they hold copyrights and/or distribution rights. Because Mayo Clinic Libraries are engaged in a legal licensing relationship, we request that users of licensed content provided by Mayo Clinic Libraries refrain from sharing, supplying, or allowing the ingestion of licensed content to large language models.   

Copyright & Licensure

All materials available through the Mayo Foundation Libraries should be assumed to be protected by copyright, unless specifically declared to be in the public domain, or otherwise outside of copyright protection. Full text journals, textbooks and reference works have been licensed from publishers to be available to Mayo staff and students for education, research and clinical care. License permits access to copyrighted material which may be a database, reference work, journal or textbook, by a specific community, for limited purposes, for specific period of time.  

Mayo Foundation Libraries Electronic Resources
Acceptable Use

  • Mayo staff, employees and students may search, view, and browse tables of contents, bibliographic and similar data, and full text content; and may print and/or download excerpts of reasonable quantity, provided that use of such excerpts is personal, and does not amount to or result in commercial distribution.
  • Mayo users may not use the content for any of the following purposes:
    • substantial or systematic reproduction
    • re-distribution or re-selling in any manner
    • systematic supply or distribution in any form to anyone other than a member of the Mayo Foundation
    • systematic or substantial retention of content
    • to modify, adapt, transform, translate or create any derivative work based on any materials or other content, or to infringe the copyright or other proprietary right

The Warning Concerning Copyright Restrictions appears on all library requests for photocopy and is posted at all photocopy machines.

 

Resources