Since Perusall is a free platform, you can upload material directly to your course for your students to access at no charge to them. You can upload any material you have the right or permission to share with your students: for example, open educational resources, open access articles, content that your institution has already licensed, etc.
However, you may also have content that is not freely shareable with students: for example, certain journal articles, book chapters, magazine articles, etc. In the past, you might have had students buy a coursepack with photocopies of such material. Perusall now partners with the Copyright Clearance Center to obtain permission for you of materials that you plan to distribute to your students through Perusall. Students simply pay a fee the first time they access the materials, and you can assign the content to your students in Perusall as you would any other content.
When you upload material, you are in control of deciding whether it requires copyright clearance. If the material you are uploading does not require copyright clearance, select Library > Add > Documents from my device to upload the content as you normally would; students will be able to access this content without payment.
If you decide that content you are uploading does require copyright clearance, select Library > Add > Document from my device and clear digital rights (or click Clear digital rights when you have the details panel open for an existing document in your course). Once you submit material for copyright clearance, you will be shown a fee for the material and will have the opportunity to confirm whether you want to clear the digital rights. Each document you upload would be cleared and priced separately, but students will be prompted to purchase them at all at once the first time they open any paid item in the course (but they can choose not to purchase them all if they decide to wait).
As with books from the Perusall catalog, students can purchase access directly within Perusall using a credit card. Your bookstore can also order access codes for students to redeem within Perusall for access to content that has been cleared.
You may see a warning during the digital rights process if your institution subscribes to the Copyright Clearance Center's Annual Copyright License for Higher Education. If this is the case, your institution's Annual Copyright License may already cover the material you are uploading, so you may want to check with your library to ensure that students are not being asked to pay for content that the Annual License has already paid for.