Scholarly Publishing

Who owns this image I found online?

To learn who owns an image, and if you can reuse it, you need to determine how the image is licensed, and it will be one of the following:

• Copyrighted materials are illegal for you to reuse unless you get explicit permission from the author (or can claim Fair Use).

• Creative Commons-licenses explicitly allow for various reuses, without permission.

• Items in the Public Domain have aged out of copyright, and can be used without permission.

• Works owned by the government are owned by “We, the People”, so you don’t need to ask permission to reuse them, they’re already yours!

• Indeterminate: It's possible the image won't have any author or license info attached to it. In this case, you'll need to decide if you're comfortable reusing it without asking permission or knowing how it's licensed.

Creators automatically hold copyright over any intellectual property that you create. You don't have to even write a little "c" with a circle around it next to your name on the paper, it belongs to you.

What does copyright Protect?

In the US, copyright protects fixed expressions of ideas. The author retains the sole right to do the following with their work:

• Reproduce the work
• Prepare derivative works based upon the work
• Distribute copies of the work
• Perform the work publicly
• Display the work publicly

How long does copyright last?

Copyright licenses last for the remaining lifetime of the creator plus 70 years.

Copyright is the reason articles can be placed behind paywalls. When an author submits an article to a journal, they typically sign their copyright over to the journal, so then the journal owns the article, and can require payment in order for readers to view the article.

Creative Commons licenses were created to facilitate sharing of intellectual property, and each license communicates to the user how a work may be reused, without the user needing to ask permission. Finding a creative commons license on a work you want to reuse is great news, it means all you need to do is follow the directions for reuse.

There are 6 types of Creative Commons licenses, which allow various combinations of reuse that are:

• noncommercial: no charging money to access your reuse

• provide attribution: you must attribute the original creator in your reuse

• share-alike: require new works made with old ones to themselves have a creative commons license, so that sharing gets paid forward

• non-derivative: reuse is allowed, but no re-mixing or revising of the original work is allowed (no inserting your own slides into a slide deck, no adding questions to an interview instrument, for example)

The most common license you'll see is CC BY, Creative Commons Attribution: “This license lets others distribute, remix, adapt, and build upon your work, even commercially, as long as they credit you for the original creation. This is the most accommodating of licenses offered. Recommended for maximum dissemination and use of licensed materials."

Below is an image of the Open Journal of Occupational Therapy, which has a Creative Commons License:

Items in the public domain are works that have aged out of copyright, the limits of which (in the U.S.) are currently 70 years plus the life of the author. Yes, that's right, 70 years starting the year the creator dies.

This means that new items enter the public domain every year, and a small community of scholars and enthusiasts always celebrates each January. In 2024, the original "House at Pooh Corner", by A.A. Milne with illustrations by E.H. Shepherd entered the public domain, prompting a whole lot of intellectual-property-themed Pooh memes. Read more about 2024's Public Domain newbies at this site by Duke's Center for the Study of the Public Domain.

Dive into the nitty-gritty of public domain in Stanford Libraries' guide.

Sometimes items created by the United States government get lumped into this category. Technically these works are copyrighted, but all citizens hold the copyright, so they are owned by the public. Asking permission to reuse these works is not necessary, unless you'd like to ask yourself permission?

Why can’t I just grab any image off google and put it in my power point?

Copyright: If an image is copyrighted, that means it is illegal for you to re-use it anywhere, unless you get explicit permission from the author.

Fair Use: That said, you could argue that your re-use falls under the only legal exception for using copyrighted works, “Fair Use”, if you plan to use the work for purposes like: criticism, news reporting, scholarship, comment, teaching or research

Publication: However, students usually post their works on UND’s Institutional Repository, the Scholarly Commons, which is a kind of publication, and therefore does not qualify as any of the above “Fair Use” loopholes.

Creative Commons: You can also re-use images without worrying about fair use, copyright, or permission, if the image you’re re-using has one of the six creative commons licenses.

How can I find images on the internet that I can legally reuse?

• Google has special search filters to find images that allow reuse. Simply click “Images”, then “Tools”, then “Usage rights”. Most of these images are "reusable" because they have creative commons licenses which all allow different kinds of reuse. Check the specific license to learn whether there are requirements for reuse (like citing the creator or not modifying the original). If you don't see a creative commons license, it's possible it has one and its not labeled, or that the item is copyrighted but the creator is allowing reuse without permission. The only sure bet is a creative commons license-labeled resource.

• Pixabay and Tumblr are just two of many websites that have collections of creative commons images.
  • There are different kinds of creative commons licenses, so be sure to check to the right of each image to see what kind of re-use is allowed. (commercial, non-commercial only, etc.)
  • Licensing info on Tumblr is on the right beneath the image.
• Flickr has a section of their site called The Commons, which is a conglomeration of many institutions’ photos, all of which are in the public domain (think universities and libraries and museums).
• Wikipedia also has a long list of public-domain image websites
• Government websites have images that are owned by you, so you can use them without permission.

If you’re looking for medical images specifically:

• The National Library of Medicine runs two open-source image databases, MedPix, and Openi. These images are highly specific and medical in focus, but there are lots of them. You can re-use these images any way you like, just be sure to cite them. They also have a website with historical images: the History of Medicine Digital Collections.
• The National Institutes of Health has a Tumblr page, with images organized into themed “albums”
• The CDC maintains an online collection of public health images, the Public Health Image Library, or PHIL
• University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill has a digital collection of the numerous historical colored woodcuts in the library’s first edition of De humani corporis fabrica libri septem

How do I cite images in my presentation?

Cite images in a presentation just like you would in an article or paper, using an accepted citation style like APA, AMA, Vancouver, or MLA.

• On a poster you can either:
  • place the image citations directly beneath your images
  • or use a figure number to refer to the citation located in a references section elsewhere on your poster
• In a presentation you can either
  • place image citations directly beneath your images (don’t make them so small that they’re illegible)
  • or follow common convention and include a slide of references at the end of your presentation as well as offer to email your references to your audience.