Permissions and image consent guidelines

Securing the correct permission for use of third-party material in a publication is always vital, but there are specific needs for publication in open access. Standard terms from copyright holders will often be insufficient as they tend to focus on traditional publication with limited access.

We cannot publish third-party material that does not have the correct permission, and will not put a book into production until all permissions are in place.

To ensure you receive the right permission from copyright holders, please ask them to complete the form at the end of this document or, where they ask you to use of their own materials, look for commensurate terms. Individuals and small organisations will most likely be happy to complete our form; large institutions or publishers may insist on their own, although please do try to use our form.

Understanding our permission request

You will see on the form that we require copyright holders to grant the following:

Non-exclusive permission to use the material (including, without limitation, adaptations, revised and condensed versions, and excerpts) in all media, formats and languages for distribution throughout the world, including a free-of-charge open-access PDF downloadable from various online platforms.

This differs from standard permission that will generally be granted for a limited number of print and/or digital copies. Copyright holders may also limit their permission to a given time period, within certain territories or by format. These limitations are not appropriate for UCL Press publications. As soon as the work is live online, it is available worldwide and the Creative Commons open-access licence under which it is published allows anyone to share and copy the book in any media, format or language. This means that third-party material included in the book – whether image or text – will also be shared worldwide. We make print copies available and aim to avoid a print limit as they are printed on request not to a planned schedule.

Note that permission for digital or e-book publication is not the same as permission for open-access publication. The former often refers to e.g. Kindle publication. Open-access publication requires permission for circulation using a Creative Commons (CC BY) licence.w

How to make the process easier

• Only include images or quoted text where absolutely necessary for your argument.
• Make use of your own illustrations or materials from a personal contact.
• Make use of open source materials, e.g. via Wikimedia Commons. Materials from many government sources and national institutions are also available open source. If you use open source, please supply the url for the image and its details so we can check them.
• Ask the copyright holder to use our form, because we know it contains all the correct terms. If they don’t want to do that or if you can only acquire permission through an automatic process, consider alternative images/text.
• If a copyright holder offers their ‘standard’ terms, check them for limitations that are incompatible with open-access publication and on-demand printing.
• Ask your commissioning editor before agreeing terms if you have any doubts. It can be difficult to renegotiate a permission when it has been agreed.

We advise you to check the permission status for images you want to include before you finalise any text that depends on them, in case you are unable to get the correct permission.

Finally, copyright holders may be glad to know that anyone seeking to re-use third-party material for a new purpose (ie. more than just sharing a UCL Press book) may need permission from the copyright holder. This is made clear in the following statement that appears in all our books:

Any third-party material in this book is published under the book’s Creative Commons licence unless indicated otherwise in the credit line to the material. If you would like to reuse any third-party material not covered by the book’s Creative Commons licence, you will need to obtain permission directly from the copyright holder.’

Images of identifiable people

We require evidence of consent to publish images of anyone photographed where they might reasonably expect privacy. If you do not already have this evidence, it can be given on the form below. This accords with UK copyright and data protection laws and UCL’s guiding ethical principles. However, we generally avoid publishing images of identifiable children because children’s informed consent is complex and withdrawal of images from our books is not possible. There may be exceptions to this; please ask your commissioining editor. We also avoid historical images of identifiable adults and children taken in a private location up to 70 years ago, and prefer to extend this to 100 years.

Some alternatives to images of identifiable research participants or other people are:

• an approach that focuses on spaces and places instead of faces
• stock images from image libraries with the appropriate consents
• software that converts photographs to line drawings, thereby anonymising people while maintaining their relations and actions within a space.

For technical reasons, and because it does not guarantee anonymity, we do not pixellate to blur identity.