Navigating Copyright for Reproduced Images: Part 3. Securing Permission
by Chelsea Lee
This post is part of a series on how to cite an image reproduced from another source in APA Style. Here are Part 1 and Part 2.
The third step in navigating copyright for reproduced images is securing permission.
If none of the situations described in Part 2 of this series (Sections A–D) describe your case, you must seek permission to reproduce an image by contacting the copyright holder.
If the copyright holder is a large publisher, they probably have a permissions office to handle such requests (e.g., the APA Permissions Office). Otherwise, look for a “contact us” page on the site that contains the image to know who to contact for permission.
Your request for permission should at minimum contain information about
- what image you want to reproduce;
- where you want to reproduce it (e.g., in a classroom paper, in an article to published, in a dissertation); and
- whether you will be reproducing it online, in print, or both.
Allot several weeks of time to go through the permissions process. If there is no obvious person to contact, then you should not reproduce the image because you cannot obtain permission (we recommend you then choose something else that does not require permission).
