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Copyright Information & Downloading National Library of Medicine Data

Prospective licensees and those considering downloading data for redistribution should obtain opinion from legal counsel for any use planned for the author-generated abstracts in National Library of Medicine (NLM) databases and to ensure compliance with intellectual property laws. NLM cannot provide advice about copyright issues. Some material in the NLM databases is from copyrighted publications of the respective copyright claimants. Users of the NLM databases are solely responsible for compliance with any copyright restrictions and are referred to the publication data appearing in the bibliographic citations, as well as to the copyright notices appearing in the original publications, all of which are hereby incorporated by reference. Those who search NLM databases may download for personal use and may provide others with a single copy of downloaded data.

For technical information on downloading citations from PubMed, see the following sections of the PubMed Overview which is available from the PubMed sidebar at http://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/entrez/query: "Creating a Web Link to PubMed" and "Programming Utilities for Entrez Databases."

Some records are submitted electronically by publishers for entry to PubMed. You should consult with legal counsel regarding re-use of PubMed records annotated [PubMed - as supplied by publisher].

Although a signed license agreement is not needed, users must ensure that all downloaded publicly accessible data stored in electronic form for over one year must be in compliance with the following provisions of the NLM license agreement:


a. Users of these data must be provided a clear description of how the product/service was derived, indicating the currency and the source database.

b. At least annually, the data in the downloaded product/service containing searchable MEDLINE-derived data must be corrected to incorporate the corrections NLM has made to these records during the year and in year-end maintenance. NLM data in the product/service must be carefully checked with that maintained on NLM's version of the database at the end of each calendar year and corrections made. This does not apply to products/services containing MEDLINE-derived data which itself is not searchable (e.g., MEDLINE-derived references and abstracts in the bibliography of an electronic textbook). The MEDLINE-derived data should be updated when a new edition of the product is released. In this case, users should be informed that the MEDLINE-derived data may change.

c. Users are advised to consult legal counsel to ensure compliance with intellectual property laws. NLM cannot provide advice about copyright issues.

d. Because NLM goes to considerable effort to assign MeSH terms, it prefers that these be retained as assigned by the indexers.

e. The NLM record (or portion thereof) in the product/service must be labeled so as to identify NLM as the source, except for data derived from LocatorPlus.

f. Trademark symbols must properly be used when referring to the NLM databases, system and products. A product/service using downloaded data must be named in a fashion that clearly distinguishes it from NLM-produced databases accessible at NLM.

Last updated: 29 September 2004
First published: 01 March 2001
Metadata| Permanence level: Permanent: Stable Content