Acceptable Use Policy: Home

Access and use of electronic resources made available by the Unisa Library are governed by license agreements between the University of South Africa and the publishers and providers of the electronic resources. 

Licensed electronic resources are restricted to authorized members of the Unisa community and on-site users of the Unisa Libraries. These resources may be only be used for the purposes of research, teaching and private study.

Breaches of the University’s agreements with publishers could result in the suspension of access to the resources for the entire Unisa community.

It is acceptable for an authorized Unisa user to: 

• Search, view, retrieve and display the resources for the purposes of non-commercial research, teaching and private study.
• Save, print, download or make copies of reasonable amounts or parts of a resource (such as individual journal articles or book chapters) for non-commercial personal use.
• Share content only with other Unisa faculty, staff or registered students.
• Post links to specific content in such a way that it is available only to other authorized Unisa users.

It is not acceptable for an authorized Unisa user to: 

• Use of robots or intelligent agents to do systematic, bulk or automatic downloading.
• Use the electronic resources for commercial purposes by selling or re-distribution of content to users outside the Unisa community.
• Permit anyone other than authorized Unisa users to access the licensed content.
• Engage in systematic and substantial printing, copying or downloading of content (such as entire journal issues, financial or datasets, or complete book titles).
• Post actual content or articles to web sites or listserves, private (e.g. corporate intranet) or public.
• Copy, remove, obscure or modify any copyright or other ownership marks included in the licensed resources.

Text and data mining:

Selected licensed resources permit text and data mining for scholarly purposes. Advance permission or registration is usually required. 

Unisa policies applicable are:

• Unisa Students’ Disciplinary Code
• Unisa Rules for students
• Policy for Infringement and Plagiarism
• Unisa Staff Code of Ethics and Conduct
• ICT Information Security Policy
• Library Access Policy

Student policies are available on myUnisa: https://www.unisa.ac.za/sites/myunisa/default/Learner-support-&-regions/Student-Policies-&-Rules

Information on physical access to Unisa Libraries for on-site users is available here: https://www.unisa.ac.za/sites/corporate/default/Library/Library-services/Membership

Questions about these and other uses of electronic resources, including data-mining and text-mining, should be directed to lib-help@unisa.ac.za