Copyright: Images, Tables, Charts in the Classroom, Manuscript 

Copyright is a murky area of law. It provides protection for content creators from having their work stolen and allows them to profit off the use of their content. To use a copyrighted work, you must get permission from the copyright holder and may have to pay a fee.   

You can use images, charts, and tables in the classroom- when you obtain them from the library’s resources. The copyright fee that you would normally have to pay is included in our subscriptions.  

1. In Access Medicine, you can download figures from textbooks as a PowerPoint slide to easily place in your presentation. Here is an example:

Create a myProfile with Access Medicine to select favorite images and figures to download as a PowerPoint slide. These slides contain bibliographic information of the image as shown below.   

2. In ClinicalKey, create an Elsevier account to save content and add images to your presentations.  

The presentation can then be exported as a PowerPoint file and will have the bibliographic information on the slide:

3. LWW Health Library also lets you download an image as a slide:

Create a My Health Library to save images to your account.  

In addition to Library subscriptions, there are “open” resources that you can use such as: 

• Creative Commons that allows content creators to put a license on their work that allows the use of their work so long as certain conditions are met. There are 6 different licenses available with listed definitions and requirements. Many journals that publish open access articles will do so under a Creative Commons license. This is something to keep in mind when you’re deciding what journal to submit to.

• There is also MedPix available through the National Library of Medicine. MedPix is a free open-access online database of medical images, teaching cases, and clinical topics. MedPix does restrict the use of their materials to personal and instructional use and recommends that for anything else the user should contact the original contributor.

• If you use an image or chart from a resource in your manuscript you must get permission from the copyright holder to do that. Journals author guidelines will state that the authors of the manuscript are responsible for ensuring copyright compliance in their manuscript. If you need help figuring out if you need to seek permission, please contact the library: hsl@geisinger.edu