Geotechnical News • June 2012
55
less common publication, say a trade
magazine, obtaining the permission
sometimes becomes less simple. Such
magazines often want to cash in on the
publicity by asking for an acknowl-
edgment running at the figure caption
with complete reference that contains
one or two lines of text in the figure
caption (in addition to the source list-
ing in the References section of the
paper). That may require two extra
lines for each such figure. Rightly,
authors may find a series of such extra
lines undesirable, as they may impact
the fitting all of the material to the
length limit assigned for the paper. But
the magazine has the right to demand
it. Before permitting the re-use of
an image, some magazines require
that a copy of the image in question
is forwarded for their review and
verification that it is not changed; in
some cases also that a little processing
fee be provided—they are commercial
entities, after all.
Still a minor problem. More awkward
is that when using, say a diagram from
an article in a magazine that now has
ceased to exist. Their copyrights still
exist, however, but how does one
locate the owner of the rights so a per-
mission can be solicited? In the US,
most organizers of conferences require
the authors to grant the conference to
publish the paper in a proceedings. As
the forms are more or less shortened or
expanded versions of the ASCE form,
the effect is that the author has signed
away the commercial right. The prob-
lem is that if the author a few years
after the conference was held wants to
use a figure from a proceedings paper,
where do you establish whether or not
the proceedings are under commercial
copyright, and, if they are, where do
you find the rights holder who could
be asked for the permission? Material
produced by government—taxpayer
money—are not under copyright, and
copyright cannot be created by using
a such figure in a paper, so re-use is
allowed. It is sometimes difficult to
establish that the figure you want to
use is one of those, however.
Actually, a conference does not have
to be that far back in time to make it
next to impossible to locate the person
in charge who can issue the permit.
And, how does one prove that the
issuing person does have that author-
ity? Really, the organizers of ad-hoc
conferences should seriously consider
following the lead of the Canadians:
With regard to copyrights, for papers
submitted to an Annual Conference,
the Canadian Geotechnical Society
commendably limits the subject matter
to requesting that the authors permit
the conference to publish the paper,
leaving the copyright with the authors,
stating:
In assigning the rights and
permissions to the Conference/CGS,
copyright for the paper remains with
the author(s)
. Therefore, once the
reference of source is indicated in the
caption as a paper to a CGS confer-
ence, the issue is resolved for figures
you produced yourself. However, if
you use that figure again, make sure
that the figure caption indicates the
original (the first) use of the figure as
the source.
How do we best cope — I almost
write “fight back”—with the permis-
sion to re-use requirement? Well,
regarding photos, in this age of digital
photography, it is easy to take, and
store, more than one photo of an event.
More often than not, you will find a
duplicate photo in your files. Using it
instead of re-using the previous photo
will let you always to identify the
image in your manuscript as “author’s
photo” not used before. The attitude
that
“as it is not clear who took or
owns the photo, I call it mine to use”
is not satisfactory from legal and eth-
ics point-of-view, as I was carefully
lectured about during my brief bout as
assistant book editor.
Want to re-use a previous diagram?
Well, you have the data, so just replot
the figure with whatever adjustment
of the axes, symbols, etc. you find
suitable. Then, don’t reference the
previous paper by indicating it as
the “source of the figure”, but as the
“source of the data”. Write in the
caption:
“data from Migsjälv A. et al.
(year)”
per standard style. It satis-
fies the requirement for indicating the
source of the data (the previous paper)
and it establishes you as a creator of
the diagram. There is no difference
in this regard whether the image is a
previous figure in a paper you wrote
or one from a paper that somebody
else wrote. You are always allowed to
use published data. So, if the previ-
ous paper is by somebody else, scan
the figure into an image, then, digitize
the image to extract the data, and,
finally, plot the data so-extracted. I
use a commercially available software
called “Didger”, marketed by Golden
Software. With it, a graph containing
one or two curves with, say, five or
eight points each, I can digitize into a
text file in five minutes. It will take me
another five minutes to import the text
file to Excel and produce a graph for
my paper. The effort of time invested
in less than that required to compose
a letter requiring permission to reuse
and then to provide proof of the
permission to the Journal. You know,
particularly for a figure from the olden
days when a trained draughtsman
plotted the figures, I can get the data in
sixteen decimals, whereas the draught-
sman worked from at the most two.
And, if the figure is from later days,
my plot is probably a good deal neater
than the original image.
The Canadian Geotechnical Journal
papers can be download for free by
members of the CGS, which means
that when you want to use a figure,
you can get a print screen from a high
quality pdfformat electronic version
to digitize, rather than by scanning it
from the annotated multi-generation
xerox copy in your files. (If you want
to re-use the image rather than extract-
ing the data, you do need to get that
on-line permission, though). In con-
trast, you have to pay $25 for every
paper you want to download from the
ASCE Journal or pay a substantial
one-shot annual fee (I’d be quite sur-
prised if the costs of managing that is
covered by the income generated).
