When it comes to reproducing tables and figures that have been previously published, oftentimes the journal or publisher holds their copyright and requires that you request permission to use them (sometimes with a fee). Some publishers may send you through the Copyright Clearance Center to request permissions. Checking author agreements when publishing in a journal and maintaining your rights as an author can be helpful when thinking about how you or others may want to use your work in the future.
Reusing a table or figure that is in the public domain or licensed under certain Creative Commons licenses allows you to avoid seeking permissions. Fair Use also allows you to reuse tables or figures without seeking permissions, but you will first need to carefully evaluate whether or not your work would be considered Fair Use. When in doubt about reusing someone else's tables or figures, seek permission from the copyright holder.
Identify the Rights Holder:
The most direct way to identify the rights holder is to examine a copy of the work for a copyright notice, place and date of publication, author and publisher. If the work is a sound recording, examine the disk, tape cartridge, or cassette in which the recorded sound is fixed, or the container.
The author is not always the rights holder. Rights may have been assigned to a publisher or be held by an estate. Different rights may have been assigned to different parties. The first publication, second edition, film or television rights might all be held separately.
See “How to Investigate the Copyright Status of a Work” for more detail.
US Copyright Office Circular 22: How to Investigate the Copyright Status of a Work
How to Ask for Permission
Send a letter, email, or fax. You should be sure to include:
See “How to Obtain Permission,” US Copyright Office M10.
Proceeding without Current Contact Information (e.g. the publisher is out of business or the author is deceased)
These situations present the problem of a work whose copyright holder cannot be located, despite reasonable efforts. The US Copyright Office has recognized this problem, calling such works “orphan works.” Much work is currently being done to create an exemption in the law that would encourage uses of such works by mitigating the liability risk.
At the present time, however, educators and libraries must make individual decisions concerning their use of such works, including evaluating the risk of liability. Those who proceed with their use should document and preserve their efforts to locate the copyright holder.
Fair Use in Lieu of Permission
Previous payment of a fee or even outright denial of permission does not preclude you from exercising your rights under the Copyright Act. You can still employ an appropriate specific provision or the fair use provision and there is no presumption against you for having asked permission.
No Response to Permission Request
Lack of response does not translate into a passive grant of permission to use. If your proposed use exceeds all provisions of the law, including fair use, you probably need to direct your students to a link to the work, find another work to use, or modify your proposed use to fit within fair use.
Several publishers allow UT researchers "to use, with appropriate credit, figures, tables and brief excerpts … in the Authorized User’s own scientific, scholarly and educational works." This means that UT researchers don't need to seek explicit permission to reuse these figures/tables in their own articles, chapters, or other scholarly works, as long as appropriate credit is given. This language comes from the contracts or licenses that the Libraries have with the following publishers:
In 2008, several publishers agreed to "Guidelines for Quotation and Other Academic Uses of Excerpts from Journal Articles," from the International Association of Scientific, Technical & Medical Publishers and the Professional & Scholarly Publishing division of the Association of American Publishers. These guidelines are more restrictive than the licenses identified above, and our licenses take precedence over these guidelines.
The agreement allows academics (and academic institutions) to use two figures/tables from a journal article (or no more than five from a volume) without permission from the publisher, so long as the publisher is the copyright owner of those figures/tables, and that the use is for "scholarly comment or non-commercial research or educational use." See the guidelines for full details. The following publishers agreed to the 2008 guidelines:
Attribution: the publisher guidelines agreement content was adapted from the MIT Libraries