Source
Licence Agreement 2026 (signed October 2025)
Clause 3.6 regarding AI use
3.6 Use of Licensed Materials with artificial intelligence and machine learning technologies: Artificial intelligence and machine learning technologies, particularly generative AI (all together, “AI Technologies”), continue to develop at a rapid pace. The Publisher recognises that the Licensee and its Authorised Users may wish to use the Licensed Materials in conjunction with such AI Technologies for non-Commercial research and educational purposes as permitted herein. To support such activities, the Publisher permits, as part of this Agreement, the Licensee and its Authorised Users only to use Licensed Materials with AI Technologies (including but not limited to use in training, fine-tuning, improving, retrieval-augmented generation (RAG), prompt generation and injection, embedding analysis, LLM-based semantic search, embedding generation and vectorisation, and human-in-the-loop systems) for non-Commercial research and educational purposes for the duration of the Term, solely on the terms set out in this clause 3.6. This permission is being given on an experimental and non-precedential basis, based on the current state of technological development. Should the Licensee wish to engage in any AI use cases that are not expressly permitted by this clause 3.6, such uses would be subject to separate discussion and agreement with the Publisher.
3.6.1 Applicable content: This AI permission applies to content in Journals wholly owned by the Publisher, except for:
(i) Open Access content, which is subject to the relevant Creative Commons (“CC”) license under which it has been published and made available. The Licensee or Authorised Users should make their own assessment whether the applicable CC terms would allow the relevant Open Access content to be used for the intended use case; or
(ii) third-party content contained in the Licensed Materials (such as illustrations or figures), use of which may require separate permission from the relevant third-party rightsholder.
3.6.2 Internal use only. Any use of applicable Publisher content with AI Technologies must be internal to the Licensee only, namely:
(i) Closed, secure AI environment: The AI Technology must operate within a closed, secure environment, held either on-premise or on Virtual Private Cloud, which is either: (a) owned and controlled by the Licensee; or (b) if the AI Technology is licensed to the Licensee, governed by an enterprise agreement which prohibits any third party, including the provider of the licensed AI Technology, from using any part of the Licensed Materials or the AI output for any purpose other than providing the AI Technology to Licensee and its Authorised Users; for the avoidance of doubt, the enterprise agreement must prohibit use of the Licensed Materials to develop, train, fine tune or improve any third party AI Technologies, including the provider’s.
(ii) No external display or distribution: AI use, and AI outputs from such uses, must not result in the Licensed Materials (or any part thereof or any derivative work derived from the Licensed Materials) being directly or indirectly displayed, distributed, made available or otherwise disseminated to anyone other than Authorised Users. If, subject to the restrictions herein, the Licensee and/or Authorised Users use Licensed Materials to develop, train, fine tune or otherwise improve their own AI Technology, such technology (including but not limited to any models trained, fine-tuned or improved using any Licensed Materials, pretrained weights, inference endpoints, embedding databases and derived APIs) must not be: (a) shared, published, made available or otherwise disseminated, in whole or in part, to any third parties; (b) made available open source (including without limitation, the model, weights and training data, APIs, or otherwise); or (c) used to train, fine-tune or improve any other AI Technology.
(iii) No substitution: AI use by the Licensee or Authorised Users must not create content, products or services that substitute for or compete with the Licensed Materials or any products or services of the Publisher, including the Online Services.
3.6.3 IT security: AI use by the Licensee or its Authorised Users must not disrupt the functionality of the Licensed Materials or the Online Services. Further, in conducting AI use, Licensee agrees to implement and maintain, and shall ensure that Authorised Users adhere to, robust technical and organisational security measures, at least equivalent to best industry standards, to prevent unauthorised access, copying or distribution of the Licensed Materials, including of any copies of the Licensed Materials made for the purposes of the AI use.
3.6.4 Delivery: This permission for AI use does not require the Publisher to provide or make the Licensed Materials available in a specific format or through any delivery method.
3.6.5 Attribution: The Licensee will ensure that, where reasonable to do so: (a) any outputs incorporating or referencing the Licensed Materials (or any part thereof or any derivative work derived from the Licensed Materials) cite the source in accordance with usual academic standards; and (b) any AI models trained or fine-tuned using the Licensed Materials state that fact in accordance with industry transparency standards.
3.6.6 End of AI use: Upon the end of an AI use or the end of the Term (whichever is earlier), it shall be Licensee’s sole responsibility to immediately and permanently: (a) cease using any Licensed Materials (or any part thereof) for AI use, including in AI outputs, any database or reference corpus copies for RAG use, or otherwise; (b) ensure all copies of the Licensed Materials (or any part thereof) made for an AI use are deleted; and (c) to the extent the AI use involved developing, training, fine-tuning, or improving a new or existing AI Technology, either: (i) delete such trained or refined AI Technology, or (ii) document and sequester such trained or refined AI Technology to stop any further use of it, in either case unless the parties reach separate agreement in writing on terms in respect of its ongoing use, and for the avoidance of doubt the obligations in this clause 3.6.6(c) shall include the model and any numerical parameters such as the weights involved and any derived APIs.
3.6.7 All other terms and conditions of this Agreement shall apply to the Licensee and Authorised Users’ AI use hereunder, including but not limited to clauses 3.7 [No exclusion of rights under the Copyright Designs and Patents Act 1988], 6 [Prohibited uses], 7 [Data protection and monitoring], 9.3 [Right to update the Licensed Materials], 10.1.5 [Compliance with laws], 10.3 [Right to verify compliance], 10.4 [Indemnity] and 15.2.2 [Termination for material and/or persistent breach].
3.7 Nothing in this Agreement shall in any way exclude, modify or affect any of the Licensee’s rights under the Copyright Designs and Patents Act 1988 or any statutory instruments made thereunder or any amending legislation.
