Editorial commentary
Once a paper has been published by a journal, an author or other interested party may wish to submit it for inclusion in another publisher’s journal or to incorporate some or all of its elements in another work. It is necessary to secure the copyright holder’s permission to have such material published in another source. Journals and other publishers of content will set out the circumstances under which permission must be sought in respect to using copyrighted material. Permission may be required to post online, reuse, reprint, publicly display, photocopy or otherwise reproduce for any purpose, including access via an open-access (OA) repository.
What a permission request typically covers
A request to reuse previously published material — a figure, table, extended quotation, or full chapter — normally needs to specify the exact material, the new work it will appear in, the intended audience or platform, and whether attribution alone is sufficient or a fee is also required. Many publishers route these requests through a licensing intermediary such as the Copyright Clearance Center’s RightsLink rather than handling them manually, turning around a straightforward academic reuse request — one figure in a thesis, say — in minutes.
When permission is not needed
Publication permission in this request-and-grant sense applies to material still under traditional copyright control. It is not needed for material published under an open licence such as CC BY, where the licence pre-authorises the reuses it lists — reproduction, adaptation, redistribution with attribution — without a separate request, a practical difference an open-access licence makes over traditional copyright. Reuse under fair use or fair dealing is also independent of a formal permission request, though the exception’s boundaries vary by country and are narrower than many authors assume.
Worked example / counter-example
A researcher reproducing a figure from a subscription-journal article in a PhD thesis submits a permission request via RightsLink and receives a licence specific to that reuse — publication permission in the operational sense. A researcher reproducing a CC BY figure with attribution has not sought publication permission and does not need to, because the open licence already covers it.
References
- Copyright Clearance Center, RightsLink permissions-service documentation.
Machine-readable encodings
Use in your systems
<role vocab="credit"
vocab-identifier="https://casrai.org/dictionary/"
vocab-term="Publication permission"
vocab-term-identifier="https://casrai.org/dictionary/term/publication-permission" />{
"@context": "https://schema.org",
"@type": "DefinedTerm",
"@id": "https://casrai.org/dictionary/term/publication-permission",
"name": "Publication permission",
"identifier": "https://casrai.org/dictionary/term/publication-permission",
"description": "The circumstances under which copyright material may be used and where permission must be sought from the copyright holder.",
"inDefinedTermSet": "https://casrai.org/dictionary/domain/compliance-regulatory#set",
"url": "https://casrai.org/dictionary/term/publication-permission",
"license": "https://creativecommons.org/licenses/by/4.0/",
"publisher": {
"@id": "https://casrai.org/#organization"
},
"author": {
"@id": "https://casrai.org/#editorial-team"
},
"datePublished": "2026-05-19T19:13:08",
"dateModified": "2026-09-05T14:21:35",
"inLanguage": "en-GB",
"isAccessibleForFree": true
}
