Licences copyright and permissions for journal articles

You do not need to request permission to reuse your own figures, diagrams, tables, or images that were originally published in an RSC publication. However, permission should be requested for use of the whole article or chapter except if reusing it in a thesis. If you are including an article or book chapter published by the RSC in your thesis please ensure that your co-authors are aware of this. 

Reuse of material that was published originally by the RSC must be accompanied by the appropriate acknowledgement of the publication. The form of the acknowledgement is dependent on the journal in which it was published originally, as detailed in the 'Acknowledgements' section.

Authors contributing to RSC publications (journal articles, book or book chapters) do not need to formally request permission to reproduce material contained in another RSC publication. However, permission should be requested for use of a whole article or chapter. For all cases of reproduction the correct acknowledgement of the reproduced material should be given. The form of the acknowledgement is dependent on the journal in which it was published originally, as detailed in the 'Acknowledgements' section.

Please submit a permissions request via the Copyright Clearance Center to reuse RSC material in material for another publisher. If you are an academic or you are reproducing Royal Society of Chemistry material in a publication to be published by an STM Publisher you will be granted the permission for free for up to three figures. The STM Publishers are those who have signed up to the STM Permissions Guidelines and include publishers such as the American Chemical Society, Elsevier, Springer and Wiley. Please submit your request well ahead of publication of your material.

You should check that the material you wish to reproduce is not credited to a source other than the RSC before sending in any request. If the material is credited to another publisher, you are required to seek permission from them.

An Open Access article is one published under a CC-BY or a CC-BY-NC licence. To check if an article is Open Access, find the journal article from which you want to reproduce material on https://pubs.rsc.org/, go to the article landing page by clicking on the article's title, and check the ‘Article information’ on the right-hand side. An Open Access article would read ‘This is an Open Access article’.

If the material for which you are requesting reproduction rights has been published under a CC-BY licence, you may reproduce the material, even commercially, without requesting formal permission as long as the material is fully acknowledged and a link is included back to the article on our website.

If the material for which you are requesting reproduction rights has been published under a CC-BY-NC licence, you may reproduce the material in a non-commercial publication without requesting formal permission as long as the material is fully acknowledged and a link is included back to the article on our website. Permission must be requested using this RSC Permissions Request Form for commercial reproduction.

If you are reproducing material from an RSC website, education publication or science policy publication, please fill in the RSC Permissions Request Form.

Requests are usually for use of a figure or diagram, but they may also be for use of the entire article or chapter. Requests to use individual figures or diagrams are invariably granted. Permission for another publisher to print an entire RSC article or chapter may be granted in special circumstances.

The permission form should only be used to request permission to reproduce material from Chemistry World, Education in Chemistry, and other non-journal publications of the RSC. For these requests please complete and send the RSC Permissions Request Form to our Contracts and Copyright team.