Copyrights

Copyright is provided to authors and creators of original work as a legal protection for intellectual property. Copyright gives a permission to copyright-holder to decide whether their work can be used by others and under which conditions. In academic research and publication, you have your rights in the copyrighted works you are creating, but there are also rights of the other authors in the works you are using.

If authors want to reproduce any published material from any third-party owners (extract of text, illustrations, graphics, tables), it is essential that authors request permission from the copyright-holders, usually the Publisher.

Permission is required for:

  • Your own works published by other Publishers and for which you did not retain copyright.
  • Substantial part of a work from another author
  • Use of slightly modified or unmodified figures, tables, graphs or schemes
  • Third-party photographs

 Permission is not required for:

  • If author reconstructs its own table with data already published elsewhere, but in that case the source of the data must be cited ("Data from..." or "Adapted from...")
  • Reasonably short quotes are considered fair to use.
  • Figures, graphs or schemes that are completely redrawn or changed from the original.

Open access journals, in contrast to the subscription journals, allow authors to retain the copyright in their articles. Articles are usually made available under a Creative Commons license, giving a freely access to others, as long as they credit author for the original creation.

Obtaining Permission

It is highly recommended to start process of obtaining permission as soon as possible, in order to avoid unnecessary delays in the publication of your article. Global Sustainability Challenges will not publish material from other publications without retained copyright permission.

In case you do not obtain a copyright-holders instruction how to aknowledgement them, follow the style: "Reproduced with permission from [author], [book/journal title]; published by [publisher], [year].' at the end of the caption of the Table, Figure or Scheme.