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Consider copyright when using images in surveys

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February 17, 2022

When you’re conducting surveys for your research, you may need to use visual materials. If you do, you need to consider copyright at the beginning of the process. This will avoid issues later on when you’re ready to publish your results.

You sometimes need to include images in a survey. The images may be to show a product or to illustrate a concept.

Why do you need to consider copyright in surveys?

Even if you’ll only be showing the survey to a small, closed group of people, you must consider copyright laws. This is even more true for surveys that are posted online. Note: most images you find online are not copyright free. An image on the internet is not automatically free to use.   

If you want to publish your results, publishers will often ask you to include a copy of the survey as supplementary materials. If you have not considered copyright in designing your survey, you will have a problem. You will not be able to publish your survey because of copyright. 

Think ahead when creating your survey

When creating your survey, determine if you need images in your survey. If you do, then you have four options for image use:

  1. Images under the public domain: if you use a public domain image, you don’t need to consider copyright at all.
  2. Images with a  CC license: you can use these images in your survey as long as you attribute the image to the author and you follow the license rights.
  3. Images that are copyright protected: you should consider all online images as copyright protected. You will need to find out who is the copyright owner and ask permission to use the images in your survey. You need to ask permission to use them not only in the survey but also in a future publication.
  4. Stock images that you have purchased: make sure you know the license under which you purchased the images. This will ensure  that you are allowed to use them in your survey and that you will be also allowed to use them in a publication later on.

Where can you find images in the public domain or under CC licenses?

Several sites offer open images and/or videos. You can find more tips on finding open content on this webpage.