9th April 2011, 04:58 PM
Martin Locock Wrote:the grey literature reports are in the public domain in the sense that they are accessible to the public: this does not mean that they are free of copyright restrictions so can be copied at will. Therefore a HER can show you a report, but they are correct to say that you, and they, cannot copy it without permission of the rights holder.
There are some exceptions which allow copying for specific purposes, but archaeologists in the course of their business do not qualify.
In your example you could trace the plan and then redraw it on your own base map for your report.
Interesting that most HERs don't take this view, more commonly they are happy to let you photocopy bits, most of the ones I regularly use are happy with 10%. The copyright posters they tend to have stuck on the wall by the photocopier in public libraries seem to imply that you can copy what you want from books as long as it's not for commercial reproduction, and a publisher I work with quite a lot says you can pretty much copy what you want as long as you dont try to sell it or reproduce it for sale or re-publish it (and of course plagiarism seems to go down badly).
...err, if you're going out to dig the other half of the same field it's often handy to have the whole of the previous report, so an awful lot of tracing paper would be involved....