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Permissions

  • There is a difference between permission and copyright
  • You need permission for any work in its entirety you are using in your paper
  • It is your responsibility to obtain this permission

 

We're not talking here about the copyright of your own article after you've written it, we're talking about what of other people's you can include in your own work without needing to get explicit permission.

Some things are fairly straightforward: if you use any image, photo, drawing, map, chart or table that has been devised by someone else, you need to get permission for it, and you need to state in your article that you've done so (this is because these things count as works in themselves). This normally takes the form of a caption under the picture where it appears, saying what it depicts, and then 'source: Alan Walker's collection of photographs' or similar; and then a list of illustrations at the end of the article where you say something like 'photo reproduced with the kind permission of Alan Walker.' A number of copyright-holding institutions have a particular form of wording which you must use as part of the permission deal, so if that's the case then you can just copy in whatever they've told you.

Something less obvious might be quoting a short poem for example. This cannot just be referenced in the normal way, it too needs explicit permission to be granted before it is reproduced because it is seen as a work in its entirety. If you have any doubts you can always contact the publisher you will be submitting your work too and they should be able to help.

If a photograph is your own, you can obviously publish it as you see fit, but you should include something which says 'from the author's own collection' or similar: firstly, everyone will then know it's yours and not worry that it's an unreferenced picture of someone else's; and secondly, if anyone would like to reproduce parts of your article, they'll know to contact you as the copyright holder of that photo.