Copyright

A topic in research methodology

You have copyright in your scholarly work

(but you may not have the right to copy another scholar’s work)

©

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!

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. (When I applied to SpringerNature to copy a figure from a paper in one of their journals that is discussed in a post on this site, they asked for a fee of £53.83,  even though this is a completely non-commercial website.)

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).

* This does not require formal publication for copyright to apply. If you draft an article, then legally you have copyright in that work from the time you prepared it. You will often see works marked as © with a date and name – but (in England at least) this is not required for copyright to exist (but may be useful to identify the data of the work and the copyright owner).

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 (the 'idea-expression distinction' or 'idea-expression dichotomy'). 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.

(Read about plagiarism)

Figures and diagrams in copyright should not be copied and republished without permission as this is seen as copying a design owned by the original creator (in the same way as copying the text). It is usually 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.

Are old texts copyright?

Copyright law changes form time to time, and so the rules change. Copyright law used to quite different in different jurisdictions, although there is more uniformity now. Copyright is usually limited in time. For example, the author of a written text now has copyright till 70 years after their death (i.e., the estate retains the copyright).

If a classic work is very old it may be out of copyright, but if a publisher produces a new edition then any commentary, editorial introduction, etc thag is new will have a new copyright even thoujhg the oroignal text is no longer in copyright.

What about translations?

Translating a work into another language is a skilled task that is not just algorithmic, and the translator has a copyright in the translation (and is sometimes considered as if a subsidiary author the text). So, a new English translation of, say, a Plato dialogue, would be copyright even though the original text has never been copyright (as the text preceded the notion of copyright).

Does 'open access' mean material is not copyright?

Copyright is automatic when someone creates an original text. However, the author can decide to waive their right and allow free copying (copyright gives the producer the right to control copying – which include freely allowing it), or to grant a publisher the right to publish under whatever arrangements are agreed.

Open access journals often ask authors to agree to a 'creative commons' license – that may include terms such as

• allowing free copying and distribution of the material – subject to acknowledging the source and license;
• allowing modification of the material in re-use as long as it is clear what changes have been made.

It is the responsibility of a person wishing to copy, disseminate or re-use material to check on what is legally allowed.

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!