Is it okay to share a tex template from a journal for teaching purposes? I am a graduate student in a university. I was an undergraduate student on the same university, and I have good feelings for the workplace where I did my undergraduate studies (very much so that I keep close contact with the students).

In order to enhance the writing abilities of the students (it is a Mathematics course), I had the idea of making a "toy" journal, where students would be able to submit what they were studying/thought was interesting/etc. The main objective is to improve writing and exposition capabilities, and providing motivation for the students.

In order to make the idea go forward, I considered taking a (tex) template from a journal and sending it to the students for them to write using the template. This would be excellent in terms of efficiency. However, I feel that even though this "toy" journal has only internal intentions and is only this: a "toy" journal, there may be some ethics issue on taking a possibly copyrighted asset.

I would like to know:


Are there any issue with the above, given the intentions?
If there is no issue, is there a standard way to ask for permission?
If that is not possible, are there any good free templates available?
Several journals have made their LaTeX classes available on CTAN: I suggest you to pick one of them.

Example journal classes available on CTAN are:


amsart
IEEEtran
elsarticle


As Federico Poloni rightly suggests, check anyway the license of the package you want to use, which is written on the CTAN page of the package.