Warning about large-volume or excessive downloads of electronic resources

Warning about large-volume or excessive downloads of electronic resources

October 27, 2022.

Regarding the electronic resources contracted by the University of Tokyo, we have always requested that they be used properly.
We would like to remind you once again that there are cases where we are contacted by the publisher for unauthorized large-volume or excessive downloads.
Recent cases include the following.

[Example]
Attempted to retrieve data from databases for text and data mining, using download support software and tools.
[Problem]
Electronic resources contracted by the University of Tokyo are basically not allowed to acquire data systematically, even for text mining and data mining.
[Support]
If you need the data for educational research, etc., you may obtain permission under certain conditions by consulting with the publisher or other parties in advance. Please consult with ASK if you wish to do so.

[Example]
Some reference management software was set to "Automatically attach associated PDFs and other files when saving items," and in this state, many bibliographic data were retrieved at once, resulting in a large number of PDFs being downloaded together.
[Support]
Review the settings of your reference management software and turn off the automatic PDF download setting, or retrieve bibliographic data for each item one by one, etc.

Basic Concept of Download
Please download only the necessary papers each time you need them for your research.
Consider downloading to be the same as the act of reading the text. The basic rule is "do not download (open) PDF files one after another at a time when you cannot read the text".

For more information, please see "Electronic Resources Usage Policy". Please read through the notes in addition to the Large-volume downloading and excessive use.