11 Artwork
Reusing Artwork
Image copyright can be a complicated issue, with legal nuances that differ in all parts of the world. Best practice dictates that, when including an image in your writing, you provide both a full citation of the artwork AND seek permission from the copyright holder. This can take time, and there might be fees involved, so plan in advance and coordinate with your advisor.
For ease and convenience, you might seek an illustrative image that is in the Public Domain (copyright has expired) or that is part of the Creative Commons. You can find resources for those types of images here:
Original Artwork
You own the copyright over your own original work, and so it is up to you to decide how you want to protect the work you are making available in your publication. Cite yourself as the creator and consider including smaller resolution files.
There may be limited instances in which a student, working with their advisor and thesis committee, encounters a permissions-seeking process that is prohibitively expensive or time consuming. In instances where a student and their thesis committee determine this to be the case, the Graduate College does allow students to remove images from the thesis prior to deposit with ProQuest. If circumstances require you to submit the thesis without images, you are still required to include a List of Figures that identifies and describes each image. Additionally, you will need to include a notice in the thesis that lets the reader know they can contact you for more information about the images you’ve used. If you and your thesis committee determine this option to be the most appropriate for your work, please contact the Graduate College well in advance of the thesis deposit deadline to ensure the deposit process runs smoothly.
