"Download limits": what you need to know about licensing agreements

Note: Survey is no longer active.

The UT Southwestern Health Sciences Digital Library and Learning Center provides access to many electronic resources (e.g., databases, electronic journals, etc.), and the use of these resources is governed by license agreements with vendors or publishers. Systematic or excessive downloading from an electronic resource is explicitly prohibited and may result in loss of our institutional access.

EZproxy has built-in restrictions to prevent the systematic harvesting of content by robots or other spoof mechanisms. The download limit is 100 megabytes (MB) within a 15-minute period of time. This limit could possibly be hit during normal downloading of content, so it does not necessarily suggest any illicit action on the user’s part.  When the download limit is exceeded, the user’s account is suspended for two hours, and the following message displays:

Our Library resource vendors have stipulations for the amount of content that can be downloaded by a user within a certain time period. Unfortunately, you have exceeded your download limit of 100 MB within a 15 minute time frame. Your suspension will expire in 2 hours. If you frequently receive this message, please contact the Library at Liberesources@utsouthwestern.eduWe apologize for any inconvenience.

An investigation is currently underway to assure that we prevent abuse of Library resources while minimizing any disruption of authorized usage. If you have experienced this download limit message, please fill out this brief Survey Monkey questionnaire about your experience  so we can better troubleshoot the current process.

If you have any questions or concerns, please contact us by email at Liberesources@utsouthwestern.edu.

Leave a Reply