Help:Copyright information

Copyright policy

In brief, authors retain copyright over their works, and grant to the general public limited rights to reuse their work under a Creative Commons Attribution-NonCommercial-ShareAlike license, and grant to Scholarpedia additional rights beyond the Creative Commons license. Note that these terms only come into effect for articles once the article is published -- the public has no rights to the use of articles that are "in progress". Please see the Scholarpedia:Terms of Use for more information.

Using copyrighted materials

Scholarpedia authors cannot use any content under a copyright owned by any party other than the author, or over which there are any other publishing restrictions, unless the author has obtained the necessary permissions from the copyright and/or license holders. This rule applies to all parts of Scholarpedia, including the author's own profile page. It is the author's responsibility to ensure that he or she abides by the terms of any licensing agreement permitting the inclusion of the copyrighted material. Often these terms stipulate, for example, that the author must include a phrase such as, "reproduced with permission" in the caption text for a copyrighted figure.

Note that in many cases there is no charge associated with obtaining permission from scholarly journals to re-publish one's own figures. Many journals have a streamlined process for issuing rights and permissions (e.g., see the Nature Publishing Group's "Permission requests").

Note that other authors of Scholarpedia articles can freely use figures from each other's pages. For example, if the author of an earlier article puts up figure XYZ.gif, then nothing stops you from writing Image:XYZ.gif in your article, which would result in the figure appearing in the designated space (this is not a reproduction of the figure, just a link to the existing figure).