Most scholarly publishers will require that you get permission to reuse an image, chart, graph or other visual that's already been published in a scholarly work – even if you made the image! But that doesn't mean you always have to ask for permission; in many cases, the permission might already have been granted. You can also take steps to protect your own work for the future.
The Creative Commons (CC) licenses are an easy way for creators to indicate they’re OK with others reusing their work, and they’ve become common in scholarly publishing as open access has proliferated in academia. If an article is licensed with a CC license, you can reuse any images in that article as long as you follow the terms of the CC licenses. However, if there is a notice that the copyright to the image belongs to someone other than the authors of the paper, then you should investigate to see if there’s separate licensing applied to the image.
The University Libraries has agreements with several scholarly publishers that allow anyone associated with UNR to reuse images from items in these databases without having to ask for permission.
You must give credit when reusing images from these databases. If a publisher asks for proof of permission, you can let them know permission has been granted through a contract with the publisher and the University Libraries; you can also point them to this website.
The International Association of Scientific, Technical & Medical Publishers (STM) maintains a list of publishers that agree to allow each other to reuse their images. You can see the full list of participating journals to learn more.
If you publish with a paywall journal, it’s likely you sign away all of your copyright to your works to them (unless your article was made open access through a CC license). In these cases, you no longer own the rights to your images in that work and would need to ask for permission from that publisher to reuse them in another work. If you want to protect against this, you can upload the individual images, charts, graphs or other visuals to an open repository such as Zenodo with a CC license BEFORE you submit an article using them to a journal for review. The CC license will still apply even if your article is accepted and you agree to transfer your rights to the publisher, which will allow you (and others) to reuse the image in the future without having to ask for permission.
If none of the above options fit your needs, you might need to ask for permission to reuse an item. The best way to do this is to go to the original source of the image and see if they have a process in place to make a request. Many scholarly publishers do, so just follow the instructions on their website. If you do not see a stipulated process on their website, you can always contact an editor for help.
This page has adapted information from University of Saskatchewan's Reusing Figures or Images page.
