Site Copyright

The overall site design, branding and style, images, as well as any specific site trademarks, service marks, and logos are owned by, or licensed to, the Usability Professionals' Association<. Third-party trademarks, service marks, logos, and product names that may appear are the property of their respective owners.

Site-wide Content Copyright

Usability Body of Knowledge ("Usability BoK") content is covered under the Creative Commons Attribution-Share Alike 3.0 Unported License (CC-BY-SA 3.0: http://creativecommons.org/licenses/by-sa/3.0/<). This license permits users to share and reuse Usability BoK content, including for commercial use, provided that you Attribute the content properly (see next point), and any Sharing of content is done so under the same, similar or compatible license.

Attribution guidelines

When sharing or reusing content, you must identify the Usability BoK and UPA as the source, citing:

• The name of the page that the content came from
• The URL of the page
• The date on which you accessed the content

Example citation: Usability Body of Knowledge: Heuristic Evaluation<. www.usabilitybok.org/heuristic-evaluation<. UPA International. Accessed: Nov 23, 2010.

Specific page copyright terms

Some pages within the Usability BoK will have copyright terms that differ from the site-wide copyright license. Such terms will be clearly identified at the bottom of any page where they apply. Please check each page if you plan to use Usability BoK content.

Note: Once a page has been published under the site-wide copyright terms, it will not be re-published at a later date under more restrictive terms.

Suggestions regarding Citation, Reuse and potential Commercial use

UPA recommends contacting the Usability BoK Project< and the UPA Office< to discuss your use of the Usability BoK material and specific permission for that use (which may include waiver of some aspect of the above license for particular uses) if you intend to use more than a small number of references or expect to transform the material in any significant way.

We encourage any enhancement or elaboration of the Usability BoK material to be contributed back to the project, so that it remains a valuable, living reference to the community.

Content Copyright Questions and Problems

The Usability BoK and the UPA respect existing copyrights and do not permit copyright infringement within contributed content. As the Usability BoK is a community-contributed site, it is possible that some previously copyrighted material may be inadvertently published on the public site.

• If you are a copyright owner or agent, you may notify the Usability BoK Editorial Team via e-mail or mail, providing the following information in writing:

  • Identification of the copyrighted work claimed to have been infringed, including specific reference to the section, as well as a link reference if the work is online.
  • Specific identification of the Usability BoK entry that is at issue, including URL and notes on specific passage(s).
  • Full contact details of the copyright owner and/or agent, including name, address, telephone, and e-mail address.
  • Details of the copyright owner, if an agent is acting on their behalf.

• Upon receipt of written notice of an apparent infringement, the Usability BoK Editorial Team will suspend all identified content and/or user submissions from the public site as quickly as possible, pending investigation by the editorial team. Content removed could be an entire topic article, or possibly just the disputed section (replaced by a note in the article itself), which would leave the reference links available for users.

• After the review of evidence, taking normally not more than 30 days, the Usability BoK will propose a resolution to the copyright owner and the UPA Board. All parties will have 14 days to respond, after which the disputed article will be modified or reinstated as per the proposed resolution, the final agreement between the parties. Notes of the dispute will be recorded in the notes section of the topic page itself (not for public view, but part of the administrative data record) summarizing the dispute and the resolution.