The Library uses three tiers — host, host-with-attribution, and link-only — and surfaces a rights badge on every entry. This page is the legend. It also explains what reuse is permitted on the entries we host, in plain English.
What this means. No copyright restriction applies. You can copy, excerpt, and re-use freely.
Examples: Pre-1931 US works (HathiTrust Full View), US federal works (NASA, NIST, CDC, Census, GAO, DTIC).
What this means. Explicitly dedicated to the public domain by the rights-holder. Same as Public Domain in practice.
Examples: Creative Commons Zero items at Smithsonian Libraries, Europeana, and similar.
What this means. Reusable with attribution. Including, importantly, for commercial purposes — which is why we prefer CC BY for items we host.
Examples: World Bank Open Knowledge Repository, ABS, data.gov.au, NZGOAL items.
What this means. Reusable with attribution, but derivatives must carry the same licence. We host with that obligation.
Examples: Selected institutional repositories.
What this means. Open Government Licence variants. Reusable with attribution under the issuing government's terms.
Examples: Australian, New Zealand, UK, and Canadian government publications.
What this means. We do not host this material. We index its metadata so members can find it, with a direct link to the rights-holder's site.
Examples: Subscriber-only academic articles, OECD reports under CC BY-NC, vendor whitepapers.
What we never do
- We never assume rights. If a source's licence position is unclear, the entry is Tier C (link-only) by default.
- We do not host CC BY-NC or CC BY-ND material as Tier A or B; non-commercial and no-derivatives clauses close doors we may want to keep open.
- We do not host Internet Archive items without per-item rights verification.
- We never reproduce material we have obtained via FOI request unless the responding agency has also published it to a public Disclosure Log.
- We never host classified, restricted, partnership-only, member-network-only, or AUKUS trilateral working-paper material — the full Defence Content Policy is explained in the methodology page.
What this means for you
Tier A and B documents can be excerpted, quoted, and shared by you under their original licence (with the attribution that licence requires). The rights badge on each entry tells you which licence applies. We surface the full rights note in the entry's detail panel.
Tier C documents we do not host — we link to them. Your reuse is governed entirely by the rights-holder's terms on their site, not by us.
Insights articles are written by Z-M and covered by our standard publication terms. You can quote short passages with attribution. Substantial reproduction requires our consent.
Notice and takedown
If you are a rights-holder and believe we have published something we should not have, contact director@zmatc.com.au. We respond within 24 hours, review with counsel, and either preserve with justification or retract with a dated visible notice.