General terms of use
Numdam is a digital library, containing metadata and full text files of scientific articles. Using the service involves approval of the rules of good conduct which are listed below.
Access to the database containing the bibliographical references of all the articles of all the participating journals is totally free via the search and browse functions. The database itself is the property of Mathdoc. However metadata are available under licence CC0. Numdam’s metadata are thus dedicated to the public domain. Numdam’s OAI-PMH server can be used for systematic download of metadata in various schemas.
The files containing the full text of articles are downloadable individually by users for research or educational purpose. It is forbidden to download a substantial volume of articles in order to assemble an entire volume of the paper edition or an author or subject based collection. It is forbidden to modify any content available on the Numdam site. In particular, the copyright mention cannot be separated from the attached data, either during copying, transmission or printing of these data.
An important part of the files containing the full texts of articles are dedicated to the public domain. Another part of the articles digitised by the Numdam program remain the property of the authors and the journal. However all journals have a moving-wall policy.
Open access posting on the Numdam.org website does not modify in any way the author’s rights or the copyright of the available documents. Numdam is authorized for posting on its own servers but cannot under any circumstances transfer this authorization, which remains the original owners’ responsibility for each document.
As a result, it is necessary to check the contractual terms before uploading any document to a third-party server. In general, it is better to obtain explicit agreement from the publisher and the authors.
Here are some examples:
May be republished without explicit permission from the author or the publisher:
- Documents in the public domain, respecting the moral rights of the author. (These documents are very rare on Numdam.)
- Journal articles published in open access under a Creative Commons license, in compliance with the conditions set out in the license.
May be republished by the author without explicit permission from the publisher:
- Articles in compliance with the conditions provided for in the publishing contract
- Recent articles published in a journal whose self-archiving policy is described in Sherpa / Romeo or Mir@bel, according to the conditions indicated. (Please note: the conditions described in these sites are not always exact, and in all cases reflect a state of these policies at a given point in time. A given article may be subject to different conditions.)
- All documents that fall under article 30 of the law for a Digital Republic (Law n°2016-1321 of October 7, 2016)
