Advocate Health - Midwest Library purchases subscriptions to thousands of high-quality journals, and our subscriptions provide for access to the Advocate Health - Midwest community. Sharing subscription articles outside of the Advocate Health - Midwest community may violate the contracts we have with our vendors.
How can you responsibly share journal club articles? Here are some best practices, but if you have questions, contact us.
- It’s ideal to share links to articles instead of sharing a PDF or print copy. We have instructions on how to share links to subscription articles on the Creating Persistent Links to Online Resources guide.
- If your journal club has people outside the Advocate Aurora community, consider using open access articles for your journal club because open access articles are freely available to anyone. Find open access articles in PubMed Central, which is a free digital repository of open access publications. Ideally, it is best to share links to these articles instead of PDFs.
- If the article is coming from a print journal, you can provide photocopies of the article to the journal club members.
Scanning a print article and emailing it is not allowed under Fair Use copyright law. Sharing articles that were obtained through interlibrary loan is not permitted.
If you have questions about creating persistent links, or finding open access articles, please contact us so we can help you out!
