CLA data collection exercise

This is a staff-only exercise. Students are not included, except for postgraduates who are involved with teaching or group research projects.

This exercise relates to printed publications, including photocopies and printouts. Digital or electronic resources are excluded from this exercise, as these are reported on separately.

Relevant data may come from:

• Books, magazines, journals and periodicals including extracts or line quotes.
• Copies of copies.
• Educational materials which contain multiple extracts from research journals, magazines, monographs or reference books, alongside lecturer prepared material. These resources are sometimes known as study packs, readers, course packs, course handouts, course readings and so on. Packs should pertain to courses which form any part of the 2025-26 academic year, are course or module specific (as opposed to a particular semester) and may be produced or distributed at any time. This means that packs created during a previous year but which continue to be provided to students, should be included regardless of when the packs are actually given out.
• Copyright content transcribed and used in a printed resource such as a presentation or supporting handout.
• Copyright content captured on a mobile device and subsequently printed out and or copied.
• Crown Copyright, unless published under OGL. (Some Government publications which receive private sector funding cannot be published under OGL.)
• Open resources and material from hybrid publications, where a mix of copyright and open access content is included (particularly in journals or other collections of work).
• Resources provided to non-credit bearing students covered by the HE licence; for example, if undertaking professional or short courses.
• Resources used or provided by Professional Services, such as HR training handouts or press clippings used for marketing communications.
• On-copying from born digital material made under the CLA licence is subject to the same terms as a photocopy so should be included.
• Resources containing published content which are scanned to the VLE are excluded unless they have been omitted from the CLA digital reporting process.
• Copies made for personal use or private study are excluded.

Other identifiers such as title and publisher are very important so the more detail you can provide the better, particularly if copying from another photocopy. If you’re not sure, you should still send this material to CLA as they have tools which can help to identify a publication. 

Most of the revenue CLA receive from licence holders is redistributed as royalty payments. Data collection exercises are used to ascertain whose work is being copied and how much the rights’ holders should be paid.

There are no charges or penalties for high volume copying of copyright material however many people you are sharing it with. However, it is important to be aware of what the licence allows you to copy. Further details can be found at HE Copyright Licensing Document Solutions.

For ‘born-digital’ content, once a paper printout has been made under the CLA licence, it is subject to the same terms and conditions as a photocopy and should be recorded as part of the data collection. Please see the HE Licence User Guidelines (PDF, 407KB) for details.

Whilst usually beyond the scope of our CLA licence, there are occasions when CLA can make a royalties payment for this type of content, particularly when they appear alongside other published material such as in a journal. Rather than ask colleagues to check qualifying criteria it is easier to include all relevant material and anything which is not payable will simply be filtered out when the data is processed. 

Copying of papers for examination use are excluded. However, if any other use is involved, such as using a paper after the exam in a lecture or course pack, it will need to be included.