Reuse terms of UK health guidance sources

Before writing anything, this site had to establish what it was allowed to do with each source it wanted to lean on. That licence work produced a register of nine organisations, and this is it.

This is the verification log of an editorial publisher, not legal advice. It describes terms set by other organisations, which they may change without telling anybody. Every row carries the date it was checked. Confirm at the source before you rely on it.

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Two questions people run together

May I link to it, and may I copy it. These are different questions with different answers, and conflating them is the most common mistake in this area. Linking is almost always permitted and rarely needs permission at all. Reproduction is a separate matter governed by whatever terms the publisher has set, and for health material that licence is frequently restrictive.

Of the nine organisations below, every one permits linking. Four permit reproduction. That gap is the whole reason this register exists, and it is why the editorial rule on this site is stated in five words: we link, we never copy.

The Open Government Licence

Most UK public bodies publish under the Open Government Licence, currently at version 3.0. It is genuinely permissive: you may copy, adapt and exploit the material commercially, and you may do it without asking. What it asks in return is an acknowledgement, in a specified form, and that you do not present the material in a way suggesting the publisher endorses you.

That last condition is easy to breach without noticing. Reproducing an authority's wording inside a page that also sells something reads as endorsement whatever your intention, and that reading is the one that matters.

The NHS website adds a condition of its own on top: material copied from it must be refreshed at least weekly. Anybody planning to mirror NHS content should read that requirement carefully, because a static copy breaches it within days, and a great many sites carrying NHS text are in exactly that position without knowing.

Where it gets more restrictive

NICE publishes under its own UK Open Content Licence. Free for UK use, chargeable internationally, and it requires both an attribution and a disclaimer. Its sharpest condition forbids altering the wording of a recommendation, which rules out the paraphrase most writers reach for instinctively.

That condition is more sensible than it first appears. A clinical recommendation is written tightly on purpose, and a paraphrase reliably changes its meaning while appearing to preserve it. Forbidding the paraphrase is how the publisher stops its guidance drifting through repetition.

The British Association of Dermatologists reserves its rights entirely: reproduction in whole or in part requires written permission. Two patient charities publish no licence that we could find, which is not the same as permission and has to be treated as its absence.

The non-commercial trap

The World Health Organization publishes under a Creative Commons licence carrying a non-commercial clause. For a site funded in any commercial way, that clause is decisive: the material cannot be reproduced at all, however freely it is otherwise offered.

This is worth dwelling on, because a non-commercial condition reads as generous and functions as a prohibition. It excludes exactly the publishers most likely to reach a general audience. Our own datasets carry no such clause for that reason, and having complained about it here we could hardly have done otherwise.

When a publisher says nothing

Two of the nine organisations here set out no reuse position at all. Their pages carry a copyright notice and nothing else, which leaves a writer to work out what that means.

It means no. Copyright is the default state of any published work, and permission has to be given rather than assumed; silence withholds it. The instinct to read an absence as an opening gets this backwards, and it is the single most frequent error we see in health content that has borrowed too freely.

What remains available in that situation is still substantial. You may link, you may describe what a source says in your own words, and you may cite it as evidence that a position exists. What you may not do is reproduce the wording. Both charities in this register are treated that way throughout the site: referred to, linked, never quoted.

The register

Nine organisations, each with the licence it publishes under and the date that licence was last confirmed at source.

Why the dates are the point

Strip the check dates out and what remains is a set of confident assertions about other people's legal terms, with nothing to tell a reader whether any of it still holds. A licence changes quietly, and no organisation issues a press release when it tightens its conditions of reuse.

So this register is wired into the build. A validator reads the dates and refuses to compile the site once any entry passes twelve months, which is stricter than the eighteen months applied to editorial content elsewhere here. The tighter limit reflects who gets hurt: an editorial page that ages misleads its reader, whereas a stale licence register misleads a publisher who then republishes something they had no right to.

The consequence is that this page cannot rot without the site going down with it. That will be inconvenient one day. It is the only arrangement we could think of that does not depend on somebody remembering.

Using this register

Take it, under CC BY 4.0, with attribution. If you republish it, carry the dates: they are most of what it is worth. And treat it as a starting point for your own checking rather than a substitute for it, since your use will differ from ours and a licence turns on use.

Source licence register by dermatology-clinic.net, licensed CC BY 4.0. Last checked 2026-08-03.