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I am not familiar with copyright law.

We want to make a paid service (i.e. a mobile app) that publishes manuals for procedures and other medical information thats written entirely by our staff.

We would have to reference articles from scientific journals and other sources. All published work.

The information we publish would be digested from multiple sources for each manual.

Would we be infringing any copyright laws?

Would we have to pay copyright fees to said sources for citing their work?

All published information would be of our own making. No direct quoting or use of any imagery from the referenced articles would be done.

For example

Pathology 1

  • Treatment:

    In all cases should be treated with drug A.

  • References:

    Citation to article

Would there be an issue including links to the referenced articles?

There are already applications that do this such as Sandford Guide, though I don’t know if they pay any copyright.

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    If you copy the text of the other works, it's infringement. Rewriting in your own words is not. Citation is irrelevant regarding copyright, it's more important in academic settings to avoid plagiarism complaints.
    – Barmar
    Commented Jul 3 at 17:30
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    "Would I have to pay ..." is not exactly the right question. Either something is fair use (in which case you can go ahead and do it) or it isn't (in which case you need a license to do it). But needing a license is not the same thing as needing to pay; the copyright holder might not be willing to sell a license anyway, or perhaps they grant a license on some terms without need for payment. The exception is if the law creates a compulsory license for the given use; at least in the US, there are no compulsory licenses for text publications.
    – kaya3
    Commented Jul 3 at 20:40
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    After that, "referencing" or "citing" merely means that you tell the reader that the work in question is the source of something you have included. For example, if you write "In the book X, Mr. Y wrote Z", the citation consists of "the book X, Mr. Y", which you can obviously write without infringing Mr. Y's copyright. So the real question is whether Z, the part which isn't the citation, is infringing; but the answer to that question depends on what Z is, and is the same whether or not you include the citation.
    – kaya3
    Commented Jul 3 at 20:45

1 Answer 1

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Citations and references and hyperlinks are not themselves copyright violations. Scientific principles and laws and knowledge are also not protected by copyright.

Copyright protects a particular expression of an idea, and not the idea itself. If an app quoted at length from a copyrighted article or tightly paraphrased it in a way unnecessary to express the underlying idea, this might be copyright infringement. But simply stating a fact and referencing a cited article for support is not a copyright violation.

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