Copyright Policy

Copyright is a form of legal protection for original works of authorship and covers both published and unpublished works. The holder of a copyright owns the right to reproduce published work. Authors need to use care when taking advantage of printed material, images and/or data from the Internet. It is the responsibility of the author to ensure that proper permissions are obtained as appropriate, but some use of copyrighted material is permitted without permission under “fair use” doctrine. When authors sign a copyright transfer agreement with a publisher, ownership of the published work transfers to the publisher. While it may be a courtesy to request permission to use published material from an author, permission to use previously published data, tables, figures, graphs and substantial reprinting of text must be obtained from whoever holds the copyright (or owns the data). The ability of an author to re-use their own previously copyrighted work depends on the terms of the copyright.