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Knowing What's Copied

It’s important that licence income is distributed to the correct copyright owners. That’s why, sometimes, your organisation may be asked to participate in a data collection exercise.

What this means

ICLA uses a number of means to distribute the licence fee as fairly as is practical and cost-effective for copyright holders, without imposing an undue burden of reporting on licensees. Although you do not need to keep an ongoing record of your copying, you may from time to time be asked to take part in a data gathering exercise, such as providing us with information on your publication holdings or answering questions on the copying that is done under your Licence.

Such data collection is not only an obligation under your ICLA licence, but also a legal obligation under Statutory Instrument No. 156 of 2016 – the transposition of European Union (Collective Rights Management) (Directive 2014/26/EU) Regulations 2016 into Irish law.

Copying data is needed to help inform the accurate redistribution of licence fees to authors, visual creators and publishers. To do this fairly, we must capture all types of copying – both from print and digital publications, within any period set for data collection. At a minimum, for any formal publication we need the identifier (ISBN or ISSN), page range copied and number of individuals to whom the copy has been distributed. For any non-traditional copyright content we need the URL and number of individuals to whom the copy has been distributed.

Technology is simplifying this process for many organisations and we will be pleased to work with the systems your organisation is using for managing online subscriptions, storing digital copies, receiving and distributing media-monitoring outputs and more.

Data collection in Higher Education Institutions

The adoption by a growing number of HEIs of new library management systems and reading list software, and the ability of these to work with systems like Talis Aspire and the Digital Content Store, is opening up new and simpler ways to report copying under the ICLA Licence.

We will be happy to engage with any HEI adopting these systems, discuss concerns such as publisher-direct licences, open access and potential double reporting, and provide copyright guidance.

We would like to thank all Irish HEIs already using these systems and providing copying data.