LibGuides: Copyright for Students: Using images

What is image copyright?

As with text materials, images are subject to copyright. Images can include charts, maps, photographs, diagrams, graphs and illustrations.

If you are using this material in your work you will need to ask permission from the person or organisation which holds the copyright. This will involve explaining exactly what you want to do with the material and may involve paying a fee.

Although there are some exceptions to this when using material for educational reasons these do not apply when publishing your work or uploading to the open internet. Making a digital copy available is viewed as publishing and so normal copyright restrictions apply.

Images

There are many sites available which offer high quality, free and openly licensed general images for use in resources like presentations and a few of these are highlighted below. As with any image you should check the individual license carefully before using it.

Pixabay
High quality, royalty free images which are available for both personal and commercial use.
Pexels
High quality, CC0 images which are available for both personal and commercial use.
Nappy.co
High resolution stock photos available for both personal and commercial use.
Iconfinder
Free and paid for icons which can be filtered by license.
Flickr
Photo sharing website. Images can be filtered by license.
Creative Commons Search
Searches openly licensed content from a range of sources.

Maps

There is a fair dealing convention that researchers can copy one A4 extract of a printed Ordnance Survey map for private study or non-commercial research. The attribution should take the form: © Crown copyright and database rights. Reproduced by permission of Ordnance Survey.

If using Digimap please read the terms of use on the company's website.

If using Google Maps or Google Earth the use guidelines are on their Brand Resources webpages.

Figures, illustrations, charts and tables

The owner of copyright in an image or figure may be unrelated to that of the article or other source it appears in, so establish the copyright owner or holder by checking the credit/acknowledgements line.

Exact reproduction of a previously published figure requires permission, unless it is covered by terms that explicitly allow this.

Permission is required from the copyright holder when adapting or redrawing a previously published figure, e.g. copying the figure and replacing some data.

Redrawing a previously published figure entirely, i.e. creating a new and unique figure with new data, does not require permission. Any source data or factual information must be credited.

Scientific, Technical and Medical (STM) Publishers

A group of STM publishers (see list below) have agreed that a maximum of two figures (including tables) from a journal article, or five figures from a journal volume, from their journal titles may be used, unless a separate copyright owner is identified in such a figure, in which event permission needs to be obtained from that owner.

AIP Publishing
American Chemical Society
BMJ Publishing Group Ltd
Elsevier
Institute of Physics
International Union of Crystallography
John Wiley & Sons (including Blackwell)
Oxford University Press journals
Portland Press Limited
Royal Society of Chemistry
SAGE Publications
Springer Science+Business Media
Taylor & Francis

Photographs, images of artwork, film/television/video clips and stills

Obtaining formal written permission is strongly advised.

If using material from YouTube please see Google's Copyright and Rights Management pages.

If using your own photographs or videos, you need to obtain consent from individuals who feature in the photographs or videos, and from owners/copyright holders or images/objects such as artwork in your photographs or videos, and from location owners for your photography or filming on their property.

Study Skills

Copyright for Students: Using images