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This page provides information about copyright restrictions that apply to content in Bookshelf.
Copyright-protected Publications
For content in Bookshelf, read the license and copyright statements on the bottom of each page. The license and copyright statements define what uses of the document are permitted, and apply to all associated files, including images and supplementary material, unless otherwise indicated. The terms and conditions of use are not identical for all documents. In the absence of a license or copyright statement, the document is in the public domain. Contact the publisher if you have any questions about the permissible uses of the documents.
Publications in the Public Domain
Some of the content found in Bookshelf is authored and published by the National Center for Biotechnology Information (NCBI) or other institution of the U.S. government. No permission is needed to reproduce or distribute this type of content, but the authoring institute or agency must be given appropriate attribution.
Occasionally, copyrighted material (such as a figure, table, or supplementary material), may appear in a U.S. government publication in Bookshelf. In these cases, a special copyright statement such as “Reprinted with permission from…” will accompany the material. Permission must still be sought from the original author/publisher of such material before it can be reproduced or distributed.
Disclaimer
This disclaimer relates to PubMed, PubMed Central (PMC), and Bookshelf. These three resources are scientific literature databases offered to the public by the U.S. National Library of Medicine (NLM). NLM is not a publisher, but rather collects, indexes, and archives scientific literature published by other organizations. The presence of any article, book, or document in these databases does not imply an endorsement of, or concurrence with, the contents by NLM, the National Institutes of Health (NIH), or the U.S. Federal Government.
Content in NLM literature databases may be published by academic publishers or institutions, scholarly societies, or government and non-governmental organizations. To be added to a database, a publication must apply and be selected by NLM for inclusion in MEDLINE, PMC, or Bookshelf. PubMed indexes and makes searchable the contents of these databases; MEDLINE is the primary component of PubMed. Details on the content selection processes for each database can be found at:
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Restrictions on Systematic Downloading of Books or Chapters
Crawlers and other automated processes may NOT be used to systematically retrieve content from the Bookshelf web site.
Bookshelf has an auxiliary service that may be used for automated retrieval and downloading of a special subset of books, namely, books in the Open Access Subset. This auxilliary service, the NLM LitArch FTP service, is the only service that may be used for automated downloading of content in Bookshelf.
Publisher-specified Copyright Statements
Use these links to the following publishers' sites for additional copyright statements that apply to their respective content in Bookshelf.
- CADTH (Canadian Agency for Drugs and Technologies in Health)
- Garland Science (an imprint of Taylor & Francis Group)
- Lippincott-Raven (an imprint of Lippincott Williams & Wilkins)