Dear Member: You may recall that sometime back some of the LIS-Forum members had expressed their concerns about fellow members requesting for articles on LIS-Forum. Based on these concerns we had decided not to encourage members requesting for fulltext articles on LIS-Forum. In fact as a moderator, I had sent a message requesting members not to make use of LIS-Forum for document delivery service. Quite a few members reacted to this message saying that LIS-Forum should *Not Discourage* members occasionally requesting for some fulltext articles from the fellow members. Owing to this popular demand and also the fact that the number of posting on LIS-Forum were very minimal, we had decided to entertain requests for articles from the members only under 'fair use' clause. Now the issue has been raised again. Till we take a policy decision on this matter, members should use LIS-Forum only as a last resort for their article needs and it should strictly adhere to the 'fair use' clause, i.e., for personal study/research only. There have been occasional requests for fulltext articles by the LIS-Forum members working for commercial organizations. Such requests are not entertained at all. I hope we have been able to adhere to this stance of not to entertain article requests from commercial organizations is being consistently followed. At least in future we will ensure that requests for fulltext articles from commercial organizations will *not be entertained* on LIS-Forum Thanks for your cooperation and support. - moderator
Dear Moderator,
I wonder if it is a good thing to circulate messages asking for pdfs of articles by email? Isn't this against copyright policies of most publishers? By the way, Lis-forum messages are available to the public via google searches also so perhaps we should worry about this. (For this reason, you need not circulate this message but you could take a policy decision based on this)
With best wishes, Girija