Toronto Metropolitan University Libraries licences electronic resources by subscription or purchase. These licences come with Terms of Use that place limitations on how you can use these resources. Each resource may have a different Terms of Use. If you want to use Electronic Library Resources for teaching purposes please follow these instructions. Below we have listed general guidelines that govern use of all Toronto Metropolitan University Electronic Resources for students, faculty, and TMU employees.
Please read the section below carefully.
As an authorized TMU user it is your responsibility to ensure that you comply with the Terms of Use posted for each Toronto Metropolitan University Library electronic resource. Terms of Use presented on the provider website will supersede the following guidelines. In general, where specific terms are not provided, you must abide by the following Terms of Use:
- The use of all electronic resources subscribed to by the Toronto Metropolitan University Libraries is restricted to current TMU students, faculty and staff.
- The use of the Toronto Metropolitan University Library electronic resources is for educational or research purposes only.
- You may not use these electronic resources for any commercial or private industry purpose.
- You may not share your right to access these electronic resources with any other person or organization. For example, sharing your my.torontomu account is prohibited.
- You must not in any way republish or redistribute any part of these electronic resources. For example, you cannot make content from the resources available to unauthorized users in print or electronic form via email, a web site, a database, mail etc.
- As per copyright law, you may not engage in systematic or substantial printing, copying, or downloading of content such as: entire journal issues, entire runs of a journal, a large number of sequential articles, a substantial number of images, or sections of electronic books beyond what is allowed by the publisher.
- You may not upload licensed and copyrighted content to third party platforms (e.g. Generative AI tools, Text and Data Mining tools) unless a licence explicitly allows this. The Libraries have a few license agreements that allow limited use of licensed content for use with these tools. Please contact your subject librarian for more details on current licensing terms for specific electronic resources.
- In some cases, license terms may include acknowledgement of copyright exceptions such as fair dealing which allow for the use of short excerpts of content for certain allowable purposes such as education, research, private study, criticism, review, news reporting, parody and satire by authorized users. In such cases a short excerpt may be allowed to be used for an allowable purpose, with citation.
- You must read and agree to the terms of the licence or copyright agreement for each specific electronic resource whenever such an agreement is presented. Where an explicit agreement is not required, by using the electronic resource you will have implicitly agreed to their posted licence or terms of use.
- You should not remove or alter the copyright holder’s information.
- You should always cite the source of the electronic work in your research.
Violation of the above-mentioned licensing agreement may result in the vendor of the resource suspending access for the entire Toronto Metropolitan University community. In the event of confirmed abuse disciplinary and/or legal action may be taken against individuals.
Updated January 19th, 2026