Hi all,

Technical question: when submitting a manuscript for publication in a journal, what on earth am I supposed to do about images? I’ve googled so many different options and am getting really frustrated because I can’t seem to find a straight answer.

I am submitting an article (for the first time…eek) and have a short list of four images to accompany the article. I’ve read the journal’s submission guidelines but they are typically incomprehensible and I don’t want to email them because I feel stupid/inexperienced.

Am I supposed to have obtained permissions for images first? I don’t have 300dpi versions yet either. Should I get these first or can I send along low-res (but still legible) images with my manuscript, with the promise of getting high-res ones to the journal later? They might not even accept my paper, and I know there are several stages before it gets published so I have no idea what needs to be done when.

Thanks for your help!

Aren't certain images (low def, e.g) allowable under fair-use criteria?

Ugh, I don't know, there's so much information and it's really confusing. I think I might just find as high-res as I can and see what happens...

Hi Nesrine87,

I think it depends. If you are copying the images from other articles, you definitely will need to get permission from the copyright holder. I had to obtain permission for all the images I used in my thesis from other articles and usually you do so by opening the html version of the article and somewhere just after the title and author affiliation you should see a link that says 'Get rights and contents' or something similar and it should take you to the appropriate page. To obtain the image(s), on the html article, if you click on the image you should be able to select a high resolution version of it (if available) and download it. When I requested permission, I had to create an account and select what I am using the images for (thesis in my case), which images I wanted, and how many, and they were free. I am not sure if this is usually the case if you say that you are going to reproduce them for printing (article in this case). In my case the price is always shown as 0.00.
On the other hand, if you are creating the images yourself, you do not need to obtain permission. I just indicate the software that I used to create the images. If you use a software, you should be able to (in my case) save the images in high resolution format (300 or 600dpi) by selecting Save As and going through the options available to you.
I hope this helps.

Good luck.

The journal I submitted my paper to wanted a 300 dpi image, but mine was only about 90 dpi and they accepted it, but I guess that depends on the journal.

My supervisors said just to submit it with the images as they were as the journal will look at that detail later (if it is accepted by the reviewers).