Which psychological tests may be reproduced, and which may not

What it means for a questionnaire to be copyrighted

A questionnaire is a written work. The moment its author writes the items down, copyright exists in them, as it does in a poem or a manual, with no registration and no notice needed. Nothing about the subject matter makes a test different, and nothing about an instrument being useful, or in wide clinical use, makes it free.

Three habits of thought do most of the damage.

• Finding something on the open web is taken as a licence. It is not. It is evidence about whoever put it there.
• A citation is taken as a permission. Naming the author and linking the validation paper is scholarly good manners, and has no effect at all on the right to copy.
• The absence of a prohibition is read as a permission. Copyright runs the other way: the default is reserved, and permission has to be given by somebody entitled to give it.

Publishers say so when asked. Elsevier's permissions guidance states that permission should be sought from the rights holder to reproduce any substantial part of a copyrighted work. Pearson, which sells several instruments below, is blunter: any reproduction of its tests without the prior written permission from Pearson may constitute copyright infringement, and reproduction without prior written consent does not, in Pearson's view, fall within the fair use exception of the copyright law.

Two distinctions prevent most of the confusion further down. An instrument is not one object but several, and the items, the response scale, the scoring key, the interpretive bands, the manual and the name can be owned by different people on different terms. And describing an instrument is not reproducing it: not one item from any instrument appears on this page, in any language.

What follows records what rights holders say about their own instruments, with the sentence and the address each came from. It is not legal advice, and it tells nobody what to do.

The register, in the rights holders' own words

Sixteen instruments were audited for this page in September 2026, and several of them are families rather than single scales, which is why the register names more than sixteen. Each was looked up at source: the rights holder's own page, the publisher's licence terms, or the notice printed on the copy the authors distribute themselves. Claims elsewhere that something is public domain were not accepted, because they almost always trace to another page making the same claim. Silence was recorded as unresolved, not as a yes. The two that came back positively free are in the free list further down rather than here.

Sold commercially, reproduction barred.

• The Beck Anxiety Inventory, Beck Depression Inventory-II and Beck Hopelessness Scale, published by Pearson at qualification level B, which requires a purchaser to assert professional credentials. The BDI-II page carries a 1996 to 2026 Pearson all-rights-reserved line and prices the complete print kit at $195.70.
• The Maslach Burnout Inventory, the strictest terms in the audit and strict in the way that matters here. Administration is licensed at $2.75 each with a minimum of fifty, the standard academic permission allows three sample items in a dissertation, and the licence names this use case: the instrument may not be made available via the open web, nor sent in the message body or as an attachment to survey participants.
• The Panic and Agoraphobia Scale, sold as a commercial manual, with no free-use grant of any kind.
• The Luescher colour test, whose rights holder states that the original colors, shapes, and texts of the Lusher-Color-Test and the Luescher-Diagnostics are legally protected by international copyright since 1947, which covers the interpretive text as well as the stimulus.
• The Myers-Briggs Type Indicator and the Pearson-Marr Archetype Indicator, both sold commercially and both restricting the name separately from the items. That is a different right, and it has its own section below.

Owned by a person or a journal; permission required, or already given to somebody else.

• The Mood Disorder Questionnaire, widely believed to be free and not. Authentic copies carry a footer reading, 2000 by The University of Texas Medical Branch, reprinted with permission, and the clearinghouse that contacts rights holders directly records that Jones & Bartlett Learning handles all sales, permissions, and licensing on behalf of the estate of Dr. Hirschfeld.
• The Wender Utah Rating Scale, published in a psychiatry journal in 1993. The archival copy in circulation is stamped on every page: reproduced with permission of the copyright owner, further reproduction prohibited without permission. The 25-item short form is a subset of the same items.
• The Clance Impostor Phenomenon Scale, whose author's own distributed copy says: reprinted by permission, do not reproduce without permission from Pauline Rose Clance, with her email address in the same line.
• The Mobility Inventory for Agoraphobia, whose authoritative copy on its author's university site carries her copyright notice on every page.
• The Panic Disorder Severity Scale, and Piers Steel's procrastination measures. Both are free to read and both carry a permission scoped to somebody else. Steel writes that you should feel free to use it for any research purpose or clinical purposes and adjust the scale length or anchors as you see fit, which is generous in tone and narrow in scope: a public consumer website is neither research nor clinical practice.

No statement found, either way. Five could not be resolved, which is not a softer verdict: nobody entitled to speak has said anything, so the default applies. Unlike a refusal, that can usually be changed by one email.

• The Oxford Happiness Questionnaire and the Oldenburg Burnout Inventory, both widely described as free and neither with anything primary behind the description.
• The UCLA Loneliness Scale, version 3. A university measure library offers it for download and carries no terms of use for the scale at all; the only copyright on the page is the university's own, for its website. Researchers cite the paper and do not ask, which describes academic custom rather than a licence.
• The Copenhagen Burnout Inventory, distributed openly by its home research institute in a document printing every item with no copyright notice and no restriction, and called public domain throughout the literature, with no positive grant to be found. The closest case in the audit to a yes, and still not one.
• The emotional-intelligence questionnaire circulated under the name Hall: no original publication, no identified author, no identified publisher. Unattributable is not the same as unowned, and it is the one category with a risk and no upside.

Three ways a reproduction looks legitimate and is not

A copy with no notice at all announces itself. The harder cases carry something that looks like permission, and three shapes account for nearly all of them.

First, a notice that records somebody else's permission. At the foot of an authentic Mood Disorder Questionnaire sits the line: 2000 by The University of Texas Medical Branch, reprinted with permission. Read what that sentence does. It records a transaction between the rights holder and the publisher who printed that copy. Somebody asked, was told yes, and wrote down that they had been told yes. It is evidence about them, and it grants nothing to whoever reads it later, because a permission is given to a named party for a named use and does not attach itself to the instrument and travel onward. Seeing reprinted with permission and concluding that the form is freely reprintable is reading a receipt as a licence.

The same shape sits on the author's own copy of the Clance scale, where reprinted by permission and do not reproduce without permission appear one sentence apart and only the first tends to get read. There is a second-order tell in it. Because every authentic copy of that bipolar questionnaire carries its footer, a copy arriving without one is not evidence that no rights attach: it is a copy that has had the notice taken off, and the absence is the evidence. The reproductions found in the survey below carried a citation to the 2000 validation paper instead, the footnote that would identify the rights holder replaced by one that identifies the journal.

Second, a grant scoped to somebody who is not you. The Panic Disorder Severity Scale prints it plainly: the scale is copyrighted by M. Katherine Shear, M.D.; permission has been granted to reproduce the scale on this website for clinicians to use in their practice and for researchers to use in non-industry studies; for other uses of the scale, the owner of the copyright should be contacted. Every clause is a boundary. The permission runs to that website, the users are clinicians in their own practice and researchers outside industry funding, and the last sentence covers everyone else. Reading the middle clause and stopping is reading a fence as a gate.

Third, a real open licence whose terms the copy is breaking anyway. A Creative Commons licence carrying NonCommercial says you may not use the material for commercial purposes; one carrying NoDerivatives says that if you remix, transform, or build upon the material, you may not distribute the modified material. An instrument published under both, then rebuilt as an interactive scorer on a page routing visitors to a paid service, is outside that licence twice over, and citing it on the page makes matters worse, because the citation establishes that somebody read it.

A subtler version of the same error is a licence that covers a container rather than its contents. Restricted instruments appear in full inside open-access articles, and the licence covers the article: third-party material reprinted inside under a separate permission is carved out, and careful journals say so in a rights line most readers skip. The exception is where an instrument's own authors publish the items in their own open-access article, because then the grant is theirs to give. One instrument below is in that position.

What copying actually tracks

A companion survey was run for this site in September 2026: thirteen live pages reproducing instruments from the register, each loaded and read on the day. Eleven were visibly commercial. Ten printed a score, a band or a cut-off as well as the items, which crosses a second line rather than the same one twice, because the scoring key and the bands are separately owned and one publisher in the register restricts interpretation of its instrument to clinically trained professionals.

Set that against the licences. The strictest terms in the audit belong to the burnout inventory whose licence names the open web. That instrument was found reproduced in full, with all three subscale scoring keys and their cut-off tables, as a downloadable file on a private practitioner's website, and again inside an employee-wellbeing document published by a software company, which had also changed the response scale from seven points to five. Strictness on paper predicted nothing.

What predicted something was whether a single identifiable person answers email about the instrument.

• Instruments owned by large publishers and sold to institutions get their items taken wholesale. The three Beck scales were the densest cluster in the survey, across treatment centres, private practices, therapy marketplaces, template libraries and quiz portals. The publisher's customer is a hospital or a school district, and the consumer web is not a channel it appears to police.
• Instruments owned by a named individual with a published address attract visible caution. Two commercial sites stated, unprompted, that their questionnaire was not the Clance scale and that the Clance scale is its author's copyright. That disclaimer appeared nowhere else in the survey. She is reachable, and she grants permission on request.
• Instruments carrying a scoped clinician grant were largely absent from the consumer web. Where they appeared it was on clinician platforms, which is at least arguably inside the grant.
• Orphan instruments are copied with impunity. The questionnaire with no findable author is everywhere, because nobody can be attributed and nobody can complain.

That describes where enforcement happens rather than recommending anything. It is worth writing down because the licence text is what everybody reads, and what turns out not to matter much.

The trademark point, which catches people who wrote their own items

Copyright covers the words. A trademark covers the name, and it is a separate right with its own owner and its own rules, which is how the most scrupulous site in a category can still be the one with a problem.

The Myers-Briggs Type Indicator is the example, and the exact inverse of everything above. Its owners state that the MBTI instrument may not be reproduced without written permission from the publisher, and that is respected: no site in the survey reproduced its items. What the survey found instead was page after page using the name in titles, headlines and addresses over questionnaires the sites had written themselves.

The relevant sentences are published. The foundation lists Myers-Briggs Type Indicator, Myers-Briggs, MBTI, Step I, Step II, Step III, the MBTI logo, and The Myers-Briggs Company logo as trademarks or registered trademarks of Myers & Briggs Foundation, and states that use of MBTI trademarks must only refer to genuine MBTI products and services, and that the only way to obtain an MBTI personality type assessment and results is by using the official MBTI instrument.

So an original sixteen-type questionnaire may exist, and may not be called an MBTI test or a Myers-Briggs test. A footer disclaimer does not cure a mark used in a page title or an address, because using the mark to name the product is the thing objected to. A four-letter type profile in the Jungian tradition costs nothing and is true. The same applies to the archetype indicator in the register, whose manual claims the copyright in the items and the marks over the product name in the same front matter.

The two failure modes are mirror images. Where the asset is the words, the words get taken and the name is left alone. Where the asset is the name, the words get written from scratch and the name gets taken anyway.

What is genuinely free, and on what terms

Anybody who came here for a prohibition should leave with an alternative. There are five, each with a condition, and none of the conditions is onerous.

• The PHQ-9 and the GAD-7. Their authors' distribution site states that all PHQ, GAD-7 screeners and translations are downloadable from this website and no permission is required to reproduce, translate, display or distribute them, and each form repeats the grant in its footer. There is no non-commercial carve-out in that sentence, which is the qualifier that disqualifies several other attractive instruments.
• The Rosenberg Self-Esteem Scale, which the department holding the rights says is now in the public domain, meaning you may use it without charge and without notifying the Sociology Department, and that this permission extends to making translations or adaptations as you see fit. Ten items, sixty years of published use, no rights question at all.
• The International Personality Item Pool, whose home page states that the items and scales are in the public domain, which means that one can copy, edit, translate, or use them for any purpose without asking permission and without paying a fee. For any purpose covers commercial use, which most free-for-research grants do not.
• The Camouflaging Autistic Traits Questionnaire, published by its own authors inside their open-access article under the Creative Commons Attribution 4.0 International License, which permits reproduction provided you give appropriate credit, provide a link to the licence, and indicate if changes were made. That last obligation is real, and it is the one most often dropped.
• The Burnout Assessment Tool, which is the lesson of this page in one instrument. Its authors state that the BAT is non-proprietary and may be used free of charge without requesting permission from the authors, on the conditions that the instrument should not be modified and that their 2020 publication is cited. The items then sit in two documents under opposite licences: the manual reserves all rights and forbids reproduction without prior written permission of the authors, while the authors' own article, which prints the full item list in an appendix, closes by stating that it is an open access article distributed under the Creative Commons Attribution licence. Take the items from the article.

Two cautions. Several instruments that look free are free only for non-commercial use, and that qualifier decides everything for a site carrying advertising or a paid tier. One well-known life-satisfaction scale is described by its author as free to use without permission or charge by researchers as long as credit is given, and then, separately, as permitted for non-commercial purposes only. A widely used well-being index sits under NonCommercial ShareAlike, and a short procrastination scale under NonCommercial NoDerivatives.

And a free instrument is still an instrument. Being allowed to reproduce a questionnaire does not make a website able to interpret one, and the severity bands attached to it were written for a room with a clinician in it.

What this site does

Every item in the MyTestAtlas catalogue is authored clean-room. One author may read published instruments and the literature around them, and produces a description of the construct in the language of behaviour and experience, containing no item from any instrument in any language, quoted, paraphrased, translated or offered as an example. A second author, who never reads the instruments, writes the items from that description alone. A check runs afterwards and only one way: it may report that an authored item has come out too close to a published one and which number to rewrite, and it never passes source text back.

Items come from outside the site in exactly two places, both named on the routes that use them. The Camouflaging Autistic Traits Questionnaire is reproduced in full on one self-check under the Creative Commons Attribution licence, with its authors credited, the licence linked, and the one change declared on the page: the published seven-point answer scale became this site's five-point scale, so no total is printed, because a total worked out on a different scale would not be the authors' total. The public-domain IPIP pool supplies the Big Five, emotional-intelligence, interpersonal-style and career-interest routes. Separately, one guide reprints the PHQ-9 and the GAD-7 in full and unscored, under the grant quoted above.

The rule is stricter than the licences require. Two instruments in the register are reproducible and neither is used: the Rosenberg scale, and the Burnout Assessment Tool. This site expects to carry advertising, and a licence that is comfortable for a non-commercial publisher becomes a defect on the day that changes.

There is no claim of virtue in that. The survey found the practical risk of copying to be low: thirteen live pages, several of them substantial businesses, and no sign that any had been stopped. Writing the questions bought no protection from a live threat, and it cost the search terms, because the instrument names are the queries. What it bought is a catalogue that can be indexed, translated, syndicated, sold or acquired without a rights question attaching to any of those events, and the ability to say something specific and checkable that a page which copied its questions cannot say back.