Systematic Reviews and Interlibrary Loans: Navigating Copyright Compliance
This article draws on work carried at Leeds Beckett Library by Rachel Davies (Academic Librarian), Tom Lennox (Library Services Supervisor – Lending), and Liesl Rowe (Senior Digital Library Advisor – Copyright) and is based on a presentation given by Tom and Liesl at the International Copyright-Literacy Event with Playful Opportunities for Practitioners and Scholars (Icepops) 2024, titled “Can Open, Worms Everywhere: Copyright, Interlibrary Loans, and Systematic Reviews.”
Working in Interlibrary Loan, we often find ourselves at the intersection of research needs and copyright restrictions. Recently, our team at Leeds Beckett Library faced a challenge—handling over 150 ILL article requests from a systematic review team. This situation raised important questions about how libraries manage such complex requests within the framework of copyright law.
Spotting Systematic Reviews in the Wild
Systematic reviews are the foundation of evidence-based research, especially in disciplines like healthcare and social sciences. These reviews meticulously gather and synthesise all relevant studies on a given topic, providing an unbiased, comprehensive analysis that informs everything from clinical practices to policy decisions. Conducted by teams of academics across institutions, systematic reviews demand access to vast amounts of research material—far more than most individual libraries can provide. That’s where Interlibrary Loans come into play.
Identifying systematic review requests within ILL workflows is often a challenge. Systematic review requests don’t arrive all together, neatly labelled. Instead, these requests are commonly received in smaller batches, often submitted by multiple researchers working on the project, without clear indications they are part of a collaborative review. Many libraries may not even realise they’re handling systematic review requests, which could explain the relative silence on the issue within the ILL community.
Despite this, our colleagues at UCLan have been especially helpful in sharing their experiences. While systematic reviews are rarely discussed among ILL professionals, UCLan was quick to offer guidance and insights into how they manage these requests within their institution. Their willingness to engage with us has been invaluable, especially as we continue refining our own processes at Leeds Beckett.
Single User vs. Group Demands
Silence in the library!
At Leeds Beckett, our team has become skilled at spotting patterns and identifying systematic review requests. However, a more pressing issue remains – ensuring compliance with copyright law.
Current copyright law limits articles supplied through interlibrary loans to single-user access. This restriction poses a significant challenge for systematic reviews, which often require access for multiple users across different institutions. Although the legal responsibility for compliance rests with the requester, who must sign a copyright declaration, ILL suppliers are also responsible for taking reasonable steps to ensure adherence to these rules.
This creates a dilemma: how can we support the inherently collaborative nature of systematic reviews while respecting copyright restrictions? To navigate this, I routinely contact requestors when we identify potential systematic review requests, to confirm that they understand and agree to the single-user limitation. While most academics are willing to affirm that they do not share ILL documents, it raises the question—are they truly complying with copyright, and as ILL practitioners, is there more we should be doing to ensure compliance?
CLA Conversations
Recognising the complexity of this issue, we decided to bring our concerns to the Copyright Licensing Agency (CLA). At Leeds Beckett, our team, Rachel Davies, Liesl Rowe and myself, explained the importance of systematic reviews to our research programme. We highlighted the challenges we face in supplying articles to groups of academics, particularly when they’re spread across multiple institutions. This conversation proved pivotal, directly leading to a positive development. As a result of our discussions, the new CLA license now includes provisions for sharing articles among groups of academics working on collaborative projects, even allowing for cross-institutional sharing.
Specifically, Section 2.4 of the new CLA license permits us to “make available, or permit the making available of, Digital Copies to a Collaboration Partner, via a Secure Network… for the purposes of a current Collaborative Project only and provided that the making available of Digital Copies does not amount to a Document Supply service.” While this update represents a notable advancement for collaborative research, the document supply service clause means we are unlikely to be able to provide systematic review materials through our traditional ILL networks. We are hopeful that future license revisions might address ILLs more directly, but in the meantime, we will need to explore alternative methods to provide these materials, while adhering to copyright regulations.
Strategies for Supplying
Since purchasing systematic review articles through our Collections budget isn’t feasible due to cost, we are working with our Digitisation team to find suitable methods of acquiring systematic review documents which comply with the new CLA provisions. We are also assessing the practicalities of establishing a secure network. One option under consideration is using Microsoft Teams to create secure, moderated areas for document sharing among authorised users for the duration of a project. We will need to ensure that this method meets the CLA’s security requirements and are currently evaluating its suitability for external collaborators, such as NHS participants.
While the new license introduces much-needed flexibility, there remains work to be done in fine-tuning our approach to ensure we adhere to best practices. We are eagerly awaiting further guidance from the CLA to help us implement these changes effectively.
A Call to Action
As we move forward, we’re eager to hear from other institutions navigating the same challenges. If your library is planning to take advantage of the new provisions for systematic reviews, we’d love to learn from your experiences. By sharing strategies and solutions, we can all improve our practices and ensure we’re supporting academic research within the confines of copyright law.
