The Stanford Business Library licenses electronic resources to support the research and teaching needs of the Graduate School of Business.
We enter into agreements with vendors to make these resources available to you to support your Stanford-related research and teaching. Almost all of the datasets, databases, platforms, and sites we subscribe to give us substantial academic discounts for non-commercial use compared to what they charge their corporate customers, and in return require us to follow certain terms of use.
Under our license agreements, users must NOT:
- Systematically download, scrape, or retain substantial portions of information from these e-resources. Vendors monitor usage and can detect when users are scraping or downloading a significant amount of content and can shut off access to the entire campus. If you are trying to download, access, or scrape large amounts of content, please Ask Us so we can help find a solution.
- Distribute or share data, documents, or reports from library resources to non-Stanford affiliates.
- Share login credentials (either your Stanford University or database-specific username and password) with anyone; doing so is a violation of University policy.
- Create derivative works or reuse substantial portions of pre-existing content in violation of the original work’s copyright protection.
- Use library e-resources to commercially benefit for-profit or non-profit organizations.
- Transfer bulk-U.S. sensitive-data or U.S.-government-related-data to a ‘Country of Concern’ without prior review. For more details, view the Stanford policy on the DOJ Final Rule, and if you have any questions please Ask Us.
Misuse of our resources can result in loss of access to the resource for the entire university. Please use our electronic resources responsibly – you are responsible for compliance. Vendors do monitor usage and will permanently block access to those who violate the terms.
Under our license agreements, users must:
- Read click-through agreements carefully and comply with all terms and conditions. Each data provider enforces its own terms and conditions that may further restrict your use of its resources. If you have any questions about terms of use related to a specific resource, please contact the Stanford Business Library at Ask Us.
- Cite your sources to give credit to the author/creator/publisher/vendor.
Working with outside users or organizations: Unless otherwise stated, consulting library resources to augment the practical knowledge you gain during an internship or ALP is acceptable. You may share with your team in your own words a summary-level description of what you have learned from library resources during your internship.
AI or LLM usage: Our data sets and other electronic resources are often governed by licenses and terms of use prohibiting the development, training, or refining of artificial intelligence (AI) models, such as large language models (LLM’s) or machine learning algorithms. Therefore, you typically cannot feed data/text from library resources into an external open AI tool or application (e.g. ChatGPT, Claude Code).
- Why?: The content provided in library resources is generally the intellectual property of the publisher. Content publishers are concerned about unauthorized appropriation of their data into AI tools for various business, legal, and regulatory reasons.
- What to do instead: Many library databases offer their own AI tools within the platform for you to use. In many cases, a model may be trained on a database’s proprietary content if AI tools are used within a closed computational environment.
- For a low amount of content: If your project involves low volumes of content (such as a handful of reports of a few hundred rows of data), you can generally use an AI environment managed by Stanford University IT. Pay special attention to the data risk classification (High, Med, or Low) and corresponding MinSec and MinPriv policies. For more information on approved tools, see the GenAI Tool Evaluation Matrix.
- For a large amount of content: If you’re trying to analyze a large volume of content (such as thousands of reports or thousands of rows of data), please Ask Us about your use case so we can help determine the available options.
Violating these terms is also a violation of the University Code of Conduct and the Honor Code.
If you violate these terms, your eResource access privileges may be revoked.
Stanford GSB Research Hub
The Library is part of the Research Hub, a multi-unit organization providing tailored research support services to Stanford GSB.