Copyright and permissions

• Any reference to ‘We’, ‘Us’ and ‘Our’ is to The Royal Society of Chemistry as an organisation
• Any reference to ‘Our websites’ is to websites available within rsc.org and www.chemspider.com
• Any reference to ‘You’, Your’ is to you as an individual user of Our websites

Publishing in our journals

Rights to publish

To publish material in our journals, we must acquire the legal rights to do so from the authors of that material. In general, we must obtain from the original author(s) the right to publish the material in all formats, in all media (including specifically print and electronic), with the right to sublicense those rights.

We take an exclusive licence to publish and the copyright owner retains copyright and certain other rights. This applies to both journal articles and books. For short items in journals (reviews, news items, etc) we take a non-exclusive licence. We publish open access articles under a Creative Commons licence.

In addition to obtaining the rights that we need from the author regarding his/her own material, we must also ensure that the material we publish does not infringe the copyright of others. We require the author to obtain all permissions that might be needed from third parties to include material that belongs to someone else (for example, a figure or diagram).

Author rights

When an author signs the exclusive licence to publish for a journal article, he/she retains certain rights that may be exercised without reference to The Royal Society of Chemistry. He/she may:

• Reproduce/republish portions of the article (including the abstract), including reproduction in other Royal Society of Chemistry publications.
• Copy and distribute the article for educational and research purposes, provided that any such copies are not offered for sale.  
• Reproduce, perform, transmit and otherwise communicate the article to the public in spoken presentations (including those which are accompanied by visual material such as slides, overheads and computer projections).
• Adapt the article and reproduce adaptations of the article for any purpose other that the commercial exploitation of a work similar to the original.

Persons who receive or access a copy of an article from an author must be notified by the author that this may not be further made available or distributed.

All cases of republication/reproduction must be accompanied by an acknowledgement of first publication of the article by The Royal Society of Chemistry. This acknowledgement should also include a hyperlink to the article on our website.

An author also has some rights concerning the deposition of the whole article, details of which are given on the Author Deposition pages.

Permission requests

As detailed in the Author rights section of this document, our authors may reproduce images from their own articles without a formal permission request as long as the reproduced material is fully acknowledged.

To process other journal permission requests we currently use RightsLink.

For all other permission requests please view our Permission Request pages.

Notifications

Open Access image

The Open Access image used on our websites can be downloaded on the Open Access Week website, and is distributed under a Creative Commons Attribution License.