Asking permission to reuse published material
Reusing a table, figure, image or passage that someone else published takes more than crediting it. A writer has to know when permission is needed, ask for it early and precisely, tell a request from a fee, check free material item by item, and know the limits that publishers and journals set on reuse without permission.
Attribution and permission
Attribution tells readers where borrowed material came from. Crediting the creator does not by itself make copying acceptable: where a work is protected by copyright, permission to copy must usually be obtained. Small portions such as a quotation may be used without permission under fair use or an exception to copyright, but that has to be done carefully.
A writer who intends to borrow words, tables, art or anything else from previously published work, even their own, should be very concerned about permissions. Attribution can be due where permission is not: a US government publication may be used without seeking permission, but citing it is still the ethical thing to do and lets the reader seek more in-depth information.
Material that needs permission
Reproducing any previously published table or figure that is not in the public domain needs permission, and so does adapting one. One author holds that a table or figure built from the data of several published studies is the writer's own creation and needs no permission, as long as its legend identifies the data sources, though some editors disagree and require permission from every source.
Copying artwork such as graphs and charts is one common infringement. Authors who cannot obtain permission from a publisher, for example because it does not respond, often adapt the figure instead, turning a bar chart into a line graph, and write "adapted from …" in the belief that this gives correct attribution and avoids infringement. It does not: an adaptation of that kind still contravenes copyright if made without permission.
Many publications allow reuse of all or part of a work without permission, so whether a reuse needs permission is found by checking the licence the publication uses, stated in its terms and conditions. Some licences permit reuse for non-commercial reasons without permission, and some permit any reuse for any purpose. The line between commercial and non-commercial is often obvious: a book for sale is commercial, and materials handed out free to colleagues are not. Between them lie grey areas, where the writer should use judgement and play safe.
Creating one's own tables and figures whenever possible is usually easier than getting and paying for permission, and it adds something new to the medical literature.
Making a request
The author is responsible for getting acceptable permissions and submitting them with the manuscript. Permissions are worth seeking early, because the article or book cannot be published until all of them have been submitted and approved, and finding the person who can actually sign the form can be difficult.
Most permissions are requested online, through the publisher's website, which asks for a description of the material and where it will be printed. A request letter is the alternative, and some publishers answer one with their own form. One author's sample request letter names the author, the title, the specific material and the work it will appear in. It asks for nonexclusive world rights in that work and all its future editions, translations and revisions, including electronic media, with full credit given to the author and publisher.
Who can grant permission
The same author always starts with the publisher, asking in the letter whether anyone else must be contacted and, if the recipient does not control the rights in their entirety, with whom to communicate. Publishers almost always hold copyright to published articles and books, so their permission should be sufficient, though some permissions editors insist that the authors are asked as well.
An author who has assigned copyright or an exclusive licence to a publisher cannot grant permission for their own figure, although authors frequently believe they can.
Copyright in published material is not always held by its publisher: in 2008 an association journal reprinted a review of its website that had first appeared in a nursing authors' and editors' newsletter from a commercial publisher, with permission from the copyright holder, who was the review's author.
A medical illustration created by a professional illustrator may have been contracted to the author and publisher for one-time use only. Reusing it then means tracking down the artist, often a difficult quest, obtaining written permission and almost certainly paying a fee. In one author's experience, a magazine granted its own permission, for a fee, only on condition that the artist's was obtained too, and when the artist could not be located the figure went unused.
The response
Publishers sometimes qualify the permission they grant: valid for only one edition, not including electronic media, or for English-language publication only. Such limits matter because the writer's own publisher will require permission to use the material in e-books as well as print, so where they appear, the writer should contact the permissions editor and ask what needs to be done.
In 2014 a writer illustrating how retractions are marked intended to reproduce a screenshot of the first page of a retracted article, and the publisher denied permission, citing a concern that it might incorrectly imply that the retraction applied to a particular journal of theirs, or to the publisher in particular. The writer argued by email that a journal or publisher which retracts an article should not fear being stigmatised where it is not culpable in some way, and held that in that case the article's prominent reference to ethics committee approval and written informed consent meant that the apparent absence of approval reflected author fraud rather than an oversight by the journal or publisher. The publisher confirmed its original position, and the writer stated in the article that the screenshot could not be shown, and why.
Permission letters received should be kept once the work is finished, because they may be useful in future writing.
Permission and fees
Needing permission often does not mean having to pay. For an item such as a graph or an image within an article, the copyright owner is unlikely to ask for payment. Most publishers who require permission do so because they want to know what people are doing with their content and to be able to refuse a use they consider inappropriate. A fee becomes probable where the reuse is for monetary gain, such as inclusion in a book for sale, and its amount depends on the use.
The cost of permissions can surprise a writer. One author puts a typical fee at $100–300 per table or figure used, and paid $100 to reuse a 12-word, three-line poem published in a specialty journal.
Many publishers now put a rights-permission link on their website for each article, providing a ready reckoner of charges for commercial uses. These links are set up in a way that rarely if ever grants free permission, so a writer who honestly believes the use is non-commercial should contact the publisher directly instead.
Freely available images
Many high-quality illustrations need no permission: historic images, illustrations published by government employees, works whose copyright has expired, and images their creators have placed online for use provided the creator is credited. Each image in a public-domain source such as Wikimedia Commons still carries some description of its conditions for use, since even someone who photographed an old statue in a museum may have attached a qualification. Many historic images also lack the crispness of modern photographs and may be rejected by journal and book editors.
A national library's image database, new in 2011 and linked to its full-text archive, returns figures and illustrations from journal articles, some of which may be freely reproduced. A figure identified there may be reproduced without charge as long as the article is labelled as distributed under a Creative Commons attribution licence or a similar one, and the original author and source are credited.
A cell image library hosted by a scientific society with public funding is intended as a public resource, yet in 2011 close to 2,600 of its images were in the public domain, while the others were copyright protected or licensed under a Creative Commons attribution licence.
In 2021 one medical writer who blogs used free images because the alternative is paying for the rights to an image or infringing copyright. She used Unsplash and Pexels, Pixabay where a vector or an icon was wanted, for example for a presentation, and the element library of the design tool Canva, in which some items are free and some are not, mostly using the free ones. In her experience, a web search for images free for commercial use usually gives good results.
In 2010 a general image search added a filter for images under a Creative Commons licence, letting a searcher restrict results to images that may be modified within the restrictions their creator sets, or reused for commercial purposes.
Limits set by publishers and journals
For text, the line is less clear than for tables and figures. How much may be quoted without permission turns on fair use, and in one author's view neither fair use nor a "lengthy quotation" has a chiseled-in-stone definition, since legal issues are ultimately settled by trial or negotiated agreement. The same author, going out on a limb, advises seeking permission for a quotation of more than 100 words, even with attribution.
Legal issues very rarely arise when credit is given for reasonable use of borrowed words. An allegation of plagiarism is one thing, but a legal complaint is unlikely when a quotation is used with careful attribution.
Guidelines issued in late 2007 by the International Association of Scientific, Technical and Medical Publishers together with the Professional Scholarly Publishing division of the Association of American Publishers allow academics and scholars to quote fewer than 100 words from a journal article, or a series of text extracts totalling fewer than 300 words, without obtaining explicit permission. They also allow a limited number of figures or tables to be reproduced from a journal issue or volume without permission. Certain conditions attach to the use of either text or figures and tables, and in 2008 only 12 publishers and scientific societies had explicitly endorsed the document.
Many science, technical and medical publishers have signed an agreement under which reasonable amounts of previously published material can be borrowed among member publishers without cost, as long as the use is properly cited and reported according to each publisher's protocol. A writer for an STM journal or book publisher should therefore ask the editor whether it takes part.
Publisher policies on reproducing figures and tables differed widely in 2023. Princeton University Press stated that no permission is needed where a chart, graph or table is reproduced in a critical study of the work or to buttress the writer's argument, that data is not copyrightable, and that unless a creative element of the depiction is reproduced without alteration, fair use can be asserted, with attribution. Oxford University Press advised, as a guide, always seeking permission for pictures (paintings, drawings, charts, engravings, photographs, cartoons and so on), for figures and maps, and for tables. In one editor's view, the STM association's guidelines give authors a broad-brush set to decide by, but guidance for a particular case is very difficult to find, because there are too many variables.
The AMWA Journal's instructions to contributors required written permission from the author(s) and publisher(s) to use any previously published material (figures, tables, or quotations of more than 100 words), and they carried the same threshold in issue after issue from 2007 to 2009.