You have copyright in your scholarly work

The creator of a work such as a text, a results table, or a diagram, automatically has copyright in that work. That means they legally they have a right to determine if and when it is copied, and to ask to be paid for the use of their work. A scholar who wishes to use someone else’s work in their own scholarly work needs to get permission, and pay any fee requested. Sometimes copyright is waived by the owners, or waived for non-commercial use. It is dangerous to assume this is the case.

Although the creator of the work initially owns the copyright, it is common that publishing houses have copyright assigned to them, or require an exclusive license for publication, as part of a publication agreement. (Copyright is considered intellectual property and may be sold on or hired out like other property.)

To scan a picture from a book or journal article (or to download one from the web) to illustrate your own work is probably an infringement of copyright (i.e., unless copyright has been waived, or the work is so old it is out of copyright).

Fair use

It is generally understood that scholars should be allowed to use modest* levels of quotation from other scholarly works for the purpose of scholarly research and criticism. (*Ultimately excessive quotation from a work could be considered by a court to be an infringement of copyright.)

This does not apply to tables and figures. Copyright tables and figures cannot be used directly, or copied, without permission. Usually such permission is provided to scholars without charge, but this cannot be assumed to always be the case.

Artistic works such as poems and novels are considered differently to academic texts. Fair use does not apply to artistic work in copyright: like diagrams they cannot be copied without permission of the copyright holder.

Some things cannot be copyrighted

Copyright does not relate to ideas. There is no limit on how much a scholar can write (in their own words) about another’s work as long as the actual text is not copied. To write about another’s ideas without acknowledgement to the source is scholarly misconduct, plagiarism, but not an issue of copyright infringement.

Figures and diagrams cannot be copied as this is seen as copying a design owned by the original creator (in the same way as copying the text). It is allowed to redraw, with substantial modification, a figure or table, such that the new version has a clearly different design. However, again, full acknowledgement to the original source (“redrawn from…”) is needed to avoid charges of plagiarism.

IMPORTANT: The author is not a lawyer and is not able to offer legal advice. The guidance on this page is offered in good faith, but does not substitute for professional advice from a qualified lawyer!