Site author Richard Steane

The BioTopics website gives access to interactive resource material, developed to support the learning and teaching of Biology at a variety of levels.

Use of BioTopics material

Important: Plagiarism - this applies to both students/pupils and teachers/lecturers

This site is regularly 'spidered' by a variety of 'bots' - visited by search engine indexing software, and also by specific agents which aim to track down students and other individuals who indulge in plagiarism.
Plagiarism is taking someone else's work or ideas and passing it off as your own. Thus it is effectively both stealing and deception.

It is not my intention to assist or condone plagiarism, and in the past I have both detected it in work submitted to me and followed up on it. I have deliberately made some sections of this site very general so that it cannot be directly used in this way.

In order not to be accused of plagiarism, you must not take any material from this site unless you acknowledge the source which you have used in your research. If you quote any sections directly from the BioTopics site, the words ought to be enclosed in quotes (speech marks), and the author (Dr. R.G. Steane) and URL ( https://www.BioTopics.co.uk/ or, preferably, the actual full URL of the page in question) should be stated.

The Joint Council for Qualifications (which represents all the examination boards) has produced a Notice for Candidates in order to explain this.

Many of the pages of this site include a notice about copyright which comes up on right-clicking.
This is not intended as a physical means of preventing copying, but merely a reminder about the status of this material.
No part of the content of this site may be republished in any form without my prior permission but individual students may quote (sections) from it freely in single documents [as long as they include a reference as source of this material to this website https://www.BioTopics.co.uk/ and/or its author Dr. R.G. Steane].

Unprincipled site masters/bloggers

Do not hot-link to this material.

It has been necessary to ban access to graphics on this site, which is theft of bandwidth and copyright infraction.

Proper website proprietors/site masters: Linking to this site

You may link to pages on this site on the internet.
If you like, you can do this using this icon:

Biotopics Biology website

To do this, simply highlight and copy the following text from this page (not the source), then insert it into your own HTML (Tip: Hold down the left mouse button and drag the mouse to highlight, then use ctrl-C to copy, and ctrl-V to paste from the clipboard into your own HTML):

<a href="https://www.biotopics.co.uk"><img src="https://www.BioTopics.co.uk/biotopicsicon.gif" width="32" height="23" border="0" alt="Biotopics Biology website" align="absbottom" hspace="5">Biotopics Biology website</a>

Then you can click on this to let me know. Usually I like to know the URL of referring pages so I think it is poor show if a site requiring registration/passwords refers to my material but does not allow me to access their pages. Moodle users: take note

Actually you do not have Javascript enabled, which I am using to avoid spam from address-gathering robots. You will have to manually type in this email address, substituting the correct symbol for AT below:linkersATbiotopics.co.uk

Network managers/intranet supervisors/other individuals running websites (including teachers)

Please do not download the files which constitute this site or sections thereof to your own computer network, intranet or website.

Copyright

Text

Animated graphics

Similarly almost all the graphics animations (GIF 89a and other formats) on this site are my work, and I retain the copyright and assert the moral right to be identified as the author of this work.

Use of graphics and other material in students' own projects

Individual students are permitted to print out and use this material without prior permission - simply e-mail to inform me afterwards, and include a reference to the author - Dr. R. G. Steane - and either the base URL of this website (https://www.BioTopics.co.uk), or the more specific topic title + URL in your work.

Teachers/lecturers (including private tuition and examination boards)

Please obtain permission and make a contribution before using this material

Static graphics

Many of the ordinary static graphics used as illustrations were originated by me in order to support this material. If you wish to produce your own graphics, I recommend the vector graphics program Xara Photo & Graphic Designer 6 (formerly Xtreme) which is quite simply the best value and fastest all-in-one graphics package you'll find. For drawings or photo work, for print or web graphics, it's the perfect choice as it enables drawings to be re-sized without loss of quality.

If you wish to use ready-produced graphics, I can recommend SSER Ltd which market several CDROMs containing educational images of a high standard.

On this site there do remain some graphics originating from other sources. Part of the skill of an experienced teacher lies in the selection of the most appropriate material from different sources so as to support student learning, so I make no apology for this. One publisher even wanted to replace graphics on this site with their own material, and I made some progress with this before the project was shelved. However if any copyright holder is concerned about the use of graphical material on this site, then I invite them to get in touch so that the matter can be resolved at the earliest opportunity.

Graphics resolution

I have recently received an increasing number of requests to use graphics material which I have originated, often with Power Point presentations and electronic whiteboards. Some users would clearly prefer graphics resized to different resolution etc.
Graphics for the world wide web relies on simple graphics to reduce download times. If the original web graphics file is used with normal printed material this may show up as coarseness (jagged lines, etc). Higher resolution graphics material may be available.

More about the development of this material