In our newest “how can we help you?” thread, a reader asks:

I’m thinking of sending a paper to a journal and have only now started thinking about copyright. Do I need to request permission from all the publishers from where I’ve cited work to include it in my paper?

Fortunately, one doesn’t need to request permission to cite work in journal articles. However, there are two things worth knowing that some people might not be aware of.

First, my understanding is that one ordinarily does have to request permission to reproduce images–from journal articles, books, or the internet–including (surprisingly) images one has previously published oneself (e.g., in a previous journal article). I just found this out relatively recently when submitting to a journal, and found it terribly frustrating, as requesting and receiving image permissions can be time intensive and it’s not clear to me why one should be able to cite written material with proper attribution but not do the same for images.

Second, my understanding is that when publishing books, one has to request permissions for epigraphs (e.g. short quotations at the head of a chapter) as well as, in some cases, permissions for long quotations of material (some publishing contracts or style guides explicitly lay out how many words a quoted passage can be without obtaining copyright permission).

I have confess that I don’t know much about copyright law, but these requirements seem pretty arbitrary to me. Anyone know more, or am I incorrect about any of this? It would be great to crowdsource information about this so that authors know what it is and is not expected! 

Originally appeared on The Philosophers’ Cocoon Read More