Images for Publication

Congratulations on your forthcoming publication project! Please note that the Visual Resources Center (VRC) staff are not lawyers and we cannot provide you with legal advice. However, we can provide you with helpful information about including images in your publication. 

If your project is accepted by a journal or under contract to be published as a book, review the guidelines provided by the press. If your project has not yet been formally accepted, there is still a lot of work you can begin to set yourself up. 

This guide outlines the general workflows associated with the publication lifecycle and outlines the ways the VRC can collaborate with you to support your publication project. We invite you to begin discussing images for your publication with the VRC as early as possible. Our services and resources for managing personal image archives may be useful for your fieldwork and research. You are welcome to work with us in some or all elements of the lifecycle of your publication—it is not required to opt-in to all aspects. Likewise, the different components do not necessarily need to proceed in a particular order, and some work can happen simultaneously or in parallel with other phases of the workflow. 

Beyond the “first-level” services described in this document, the author may need to engage a research assistant or a copyright consultant out of their own funds. The VRC can offer training to faculty-funded RAs on finding, preparing, and licensing images for publication, but we cannot manage the RA or these processes on your behalf. 

This service is offered to graduate students and faculty in the University of Chicago Humanities Division as a parallel to our Images for Dissertation service, which is available to graduate students of the University of Chicago Humanities Division. [Last updated 10/16/24]

Copyright Information Center

Email visualresources@uchicago.edu to set up an appointment to discuss your publication project and how the VRC can help you move permissions forward. Before our meeting, we’ll review your materials and make some notes. We can share models and strategies for conducting copyright assessments, direct you to resources, and do some light research into potential copyright holders. However, we cannot send permissions requests on your behalf. 

Before meeting with a VRC staff member, please share any guidelines from your press or editor and any materials you’ve assembled, including an image list, captions, alt-text, any permissions logs, etc.

The VRC recommends tracking the images used in your publication in a spreadsheet, where you can include information about each image, including the caption, the copyright status, a fair use justification (where appropriate), alt-text, the image size, and other notes. 

Some editors and publishers provide a template for you to track your list of figures. If your press or editor has not provided an official log, we recommend this template that you can copy and adapt/expand for your own purposes. The second tab of the template defines the role of each field in the template. 

The VRC can help create and maintain a shared spreadsheet of image sources and other identifying caption information when possible.

Your editor will likely want you to transfer permissions, image files, and other documentation related to publishing images through a shared Box folder or similar service.

Next, you must conduct a copyright assessment and/or fair use analysis for each image.  Where permissions are required, the VRC can help advise your strategy and language, but you will need to coordinate all licensing and permissions efforts with the relevant copyright holders.

Be sure to take note of any copyright statements, licenses, or other rights information provided by the image source. In addition to needing to include that information in the caption or citation, we recommend that you also vet the information provided against your own knowledge of art and image copyright using the recommended resources below. Occasionally, individuals or institutions may attempt to claim rights over the work or the image when it is in the public domain or when there are no additional rights to claim. (For example, claiming copyright over a reproduction image made from a scan or photograph of a 2D work of art that’s in the public domain, or supplying a CC-BY-NC license over a work that is in the public domain and should have been presented under a CC0 license instead.) 

The VRC can help you establish project specific strategies and examples for assessing copyright and we can review your questions. Please note you will need to carefully review any copyright information provided by the VRC and make the decision you’re comfortable with.

Resources for Assessing Copyright Status

• Copyright Term and the Public Domain in the United States
• CAA Guidelines & Standards: Intellectual Property

Sample Language for Noting Work Copyright Status

The underlying work depicted in the image (ie, the work of art) will typically be listed as Copyrighted or Public Domain. Include the full rights statement provided by the institution in the work or copyright status field, as appropriate, and in the caption as well.

Sample Language for Noting Image Copyright Status

As noted above, the image of the work may have its own copyright considerations. Some sample language for noting image copyright status include: 

• Photograph by the author (you are the copyright owner of a photograph you have made)
• Copyright statements or credit lines from the copyright owner, such as “© Albert Renger-Patzsch Archiv / Ann u. Jürgen Wilde, Zülpich / Artists Rights Society (ARS), New York”
• N/A: This is a faithful photographic reproduction of a two-dimensional work of art.
• N/A: CC0 license (or similar Creative Commons designation)
• N/A: Open access use

Other Permissions Considerations

There might be additional considerations in addition to copyright-related issues that you may need to make. For example, if your photographs have people depicted in them, you may want to request their permission for publishing their likeness. Additionally, if your images depict sensitive materials or cultural objects, they might require additional permissions. The VRC maintains a page on Ethical Considerations for Images that we invite you to explore for more information.

Fair Use Analysis

Your publisher or editor may be open to publishing images under fair use (for example, Art Journal and Yale University Press have robust fair use policies). For works and/or images that are copyrighted, conduct a fair use analysis to see if you can justify your use of the image in your justification. The VRC follows the CAA Code of Best Practices in Fair Use for the Visual Arts. Section One of the code outlines the situations, principles and limitations of using images fairly in analytic writing. 

The United States Copyright Act provides a framework to determine whether the use of copyrighted materials constitutes a “fair use” based upon a consideration of the following Four Factors: 

1. Purpose and character of your use, including whether the use is of a commercial nature or is for nonprofit educational purposes;
2. The nature of the copyrighted work you want to use;
3. The amount and substantiality of the portion of the work that you used in relation to the copyrighted work as a whole;
4. The effect of your use upon the potential market for or value of the copyrighted work.

The United States Copyright Office provides useful guidance for understanding this analysis.

Where you plan to assert fair use of a copyrighted work, the VRC recommends you provide brief a justification or note in support of your decision. We recommend consulting the guidance outlined in the CAA Code of Best Practices for Fair Use when drafting your analysis. Include as many phrases that are relevant to your specific use. 

For example: 

• The use of the work in its entirety is crucial to the argument outlined on pages x-y because ABC. The scan is a high-fidelity copy of a work published in 1975, with accurate color and cropping. The image size is 2500 pixels on the long edge and 300 ppi, a resolution suitable for book publication. I have cited the image in the caption, figure list, and referenced it heavily within the text.

For images that are copyrighted and where fair use does not apply, you will need to identify copyright holders and obtain permission to publish these images in your work.

Please note—even where you believe you have a defensible argument that you use of an image would qualify for fair use, you may still wish to pursue getting permission to publish images, for example, in order to fulfill ethical commitments, maintain a good relationship with an artist or institution or where you are aware that a rights holder is especially aggressive in taking action against unlicensed use of its copyrighted material.

There may be copyrighted images for which you need or want to request permission from the copyright holder to use the images in your publication. You will want to send a written request for permission to the copyright holder or its representatives (such as ARS). Make sure to include information requested by the press including print run, distribution, online access, etc. 

The official permissions log from your editor may contain fields where you can track each point of contact and follow-up, but if it does not contain those fields, we recommend tracking that information in a separate spreadsheet. If you do decide to claim fair use for an image for which you sought permission, having a record of attempted contacts may help support your claim.

Please review the VRC’s guide to Copyright Resources for Academic Publishing for more information on identifying rights holders and templates and sample language for requesting permission.

For more information on citing images, we invite you to explore the VRC’s guide to Image Citations and Captions, which includes a discussion of citational ethics. The VRC can help you establish project-specific models for preparing captions, and we can answer your questions.

To ensure accessibility in electronic publication formats such as e-books, publishers are increasingly requiring authors to include alternative text (alt-text) for all visual components of your publication, including the book cover, charts, maps, images, and illustrations. 

The image caption and your references to the image in the body are visible on the screen. Alternative text (alt-text) is typically hidden on the screen, but is available to readers using assistive technology, such as screen readers and other text-to-speech tools. 

Generally, alt-text descriptions should be a complete sentence, typically around 10-20 words, or 100 characters long. Alt-text descriptions work in tandem with image captions and the way you describe and engage with the image in your body text. Consider the relationship between these components in your writing, so they don’t duplicate or repeat information. 

Finnegan Shannon and Bojana Cokylat of Alt Text as Poetry write “The resulting alt text is often written in a reluctant, perfunctory style, but it has tremendous expressive potential.” The VRC encourages authors to be as active as possible when drafting alt-text for images. The MCA Chicago Guidelines for Writing Alt Descriptions have excellent guidelines, including advice on how to engage with race, gender, and other demographic information. 

Most editors want to receive your alt-text descriptions in a single Word file. The VRC recommends drafting/tracking alt-text in your spreadsheet log, next to the captions. Then, you can export the alt-text descriptions to a single Word file when you submit your final manuscript components. 

The VRC can help you establish project-specific examples and strategies for drafting alt-text, and we can review your questions. 

Resources:

• MCA Chicago Guidelines for Writing Alt Descriptions (Coyote)

Describing Visual Resources for Accessibility in Arts & Humanities Publications (University of Michigan Library)

Review the image quality and specifications of each image based on the guidelines from the press. For example, many press guidelines suggest the following:

• Color images: tiff files that are at least 300ppi and printable at 4x6” or larger
• Grayscale images may require higher ppi than color images
• Line drawings: may be required in vector format, such as .indd files from Adobe InDesign or .ai files from Adobe Illustrator. The VRC and/or Academic Technology Services may be able to assist with drawings. Please write to the VRC for more information.
• Film stills captured from DVD and Blu-Rays may need to be artificially upsampled in order to meet the press specifications, although if you can create them on a 27” desktop monitor rather than a laptop screen they may be sufficient size for publication.

If your images aren’t publication quality, please write to the VRC to discuss requesting new images and/or help editing existing images. The VRC can help by conducting first-level image research to find high-resolution images online or published sources to digitize the image. We can also purchase image files for a small fee from repositories when there is not a comparable reproduction to digitize. The VRC can also assist with creating custom digital images for your publication, including line drawings, image stitching, maps, and diagram creation. The VRC cannot pay for licenses, permission to publish, or usage fees.

Note: Resolution is a relative value. Image resolution and image size are inversely proportional. Knowing the output or print size required by the publisher will help assess whether your images are up to publication quality. We recommend reviewing image size in Adobe Photoshop. Their Image Size tool allows you to explore what size images can be printed at different resolutions by unchecking the “Resample” button. Downsampling (ie, making an image smaller) is acceptable, but we do not recommend upsampling (ie, adding arbitrary pixels to make an image larger).

If the images you’re publishing are relevant to future teaching and research, but aren’t yet well-represented in the departmental image collection, we welcome the opportunity to collaborate and we invite you to contribute your images to the Art History Department Image Collection in our LUNA database. If you’re interested in pursuing this collaboration, we can embargo the images for up to 5 years before making them available in LUNA if you would like.