Clinical Key and #OER

Clinical Key is a new product from Elsevier which will search 700 textbooks and 400 journals for clinical content.

I came across Clinical Key today by a tweet in #tipsfornewdocs

#tipsfornewdocs If you're at UCL, @ClinicalKey is being trialled until 28 September bit.ly/QD7q9i
— Breda Corish (@BredaCorish) July 25, 2012

I then found a YouTube about the 'Presentation Maker' in Clinical Key which allows images to be imported into Powerpoint with all the copyright information embedded. Sounds good.

But going forward we would like to make our educational materials open educational resources which with could easily share with others. Would this be possible with Clinical Key?


I asked the Twitter account and got the following response:

@amcunningham Sharing within an LMS of subscribing institutions, no problem. The content on @ClinicalKey is copyrighted material, so no OER.
— ClinicalKey (@ClinicalKey) July 25, 2012

In the mean time I had missed a tweet from Brenda directing me to the Presentation Maker Terms and Conditions. These specify that "Authorized users for ClinicalKey have permission to use content from the site in presenations for noncommercial use.  You must keep intact all copyright and other proprietary notices"


But producing an OER is a noncommercial use. I would have thought that using Elsevier images in a presentation with their copyright respected would be a great way of advertising what might be a very useful service.


Maybe Clinical Key will rethink this.