When you publish in a Royal Society of Chemistry journal, you keep the copyright of the manuscript. On this page you can learn more about our Licence to Publish and the rights you retain as an author. We also explain where you can deposit and share your article, and how to request permission to re-use other people’s work. 

The following details apply only to authors accepting the standard Licence to Publish. Authors who are interested in publishing open access should visit our open access pages for more information about our open access licences and deposition rights.

On this page

About our licence to publish
Rights retained by authors
Deposition & sharing rights
Re-use permission requests

About our licence to publish

In order to publish material the Royal Society of Chemistry must acquire the necessary legal rights from the author(s) 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.

For all articles published in our journals, we require the author to accept a 'licence to publish'. This licence is normally requested after their article is accepted for publication. By signing this licence the author (who is either the copyright owner or who is authorised to sign on behalf of the copyright owner, for example his/her employer) grants to the Royal Society of Chemistry the exclusive right and licence throughout the world to edit, adapt, translate, reproduce and publish the manuscript in all formats, in all media and by all means (whether now existing or in future devised).

The Royal Society of Chemistry thus acquires an exclusive licence to publish and all practical rights to the manuscript, except the copyright. The copyright of the manuscript remains with the copyright owner. The copyright owner also retains certain rights regarding the sharing and deposition of their article and the re-use of the published material. For short items in journals (news items, etc) we take a non-exclusive licence in the form of a brief 'terms and conditions for acceptance' document.

What is copyright?

Copyright

Copyright is an intellectual property right chiefly concerned with original written works and the typographical arrangement of published works. Copyright owners have the exclusive right to copy their work and to issue copies of their work to the public, and it is an infringement for anyone else to do so without the copyright owner's permission.

Much of what the Royal Society of Chemistry publishes is work written by third parties (the copyright owner), and it is important that we obtain the proper authority and rights to publish this material. We may do this by obtaining a licence to publish (with the copyright owner retaining copyright), or by taking assignment of copyright to the Royal Society of Chemistry. We must also ensure that the material we publish does not infringe the copyright of others. The Royal Society of Chemistry must acquire the legal rights it needs to publish material and the rights it needs to manage and protect the material it publishes.

The Royal Society of Chemistry must respect the copyright of others, and it must be sure that it has the proper authority to use material that has already been published elsewhere and is owned by someone else (for example, reusing material in our own publications).

Assurances

In the licence to publish, the author provides the assurances that we need to publish the material, including assurances that the work is original to the author, that the work has not been published already and that permissions have been obtained if previously published material has been included.

If the manuscript includes material that belongs to someone else (for example, a figure or diagram), we require the author to obtain all permissions that may be needed from third parties. If you wish to reuse material that was not published originally by the Royal Society of Chemistry please see Re-use permission requests.

Download the Royal Society of Chemistry licence to publish

Rights retained by authors

When the author accepts 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.

Reproduce/republish portions of the article (including the abstract).

Photocopy the article and distribute such photocopies and distribute copies of the PDF of the article for personal or professional use only (the Royal Society of Chemistry makes this PDF available to the corresponding author of the article upon publication. Any such copies should not be offered for sale. Persons who receive or access the PDF mentioned above must be notified that this may not be made available further or distributed.).

Adapt the article and reproduce adaptations of the article for any purpose other than the commercial exploitation of a work similar to the original.

Reproduce, perform, transmit and otherwise communicate the article to the public in spoken presentations (including those that are accompanied by visual material such as slides, overheads and computer projections).

The author(s) must submit a written request to the Royal Society of Chemistry for any use other than those specified above.

All cases of republication/reproduction must be accompanied by an acknowledgement of first publication of the work by the Royal Society of Chemistry, the wording of which depends on the journal in which the article was published originally. The acknowledgement should also include a hyperlink to the article on the Royal Society of Chemistry website.

The author also has some rights concerning the deposition of the whole article.

Deposition and sharing rights

The following details apply only to authors accepting the standard licence to publish. Authors who have accepted one of the open access licences to publish, or are thinking of doing so, should refer to the details for open access deposition rights.

When the author accepts the licence to publish for a journal article, he/she retains certain rights concerning the deposition of the whole article. This table summarises how you may distribute the accepted manuscript and version of record of your article.

 

Sharing rights Accepted manuscript Version of record
Share with individuals on request, for personal use ✓ ✓
Use for teaching or training materials ✓ ✓
Use in submissions of grant applications, or academic requirements such as theses or dissertations ✓ ✓
Share with a closed group of research collaborators, for example via an intranet or privately via a scholarly communication network ✓ ✓
Share publicly via a scholarly communication network that has signed up to STM sharing principles ⌛ ✕
Share publicly via a personal website, institutional repository or other not-for-profit repository ⌛ ✕
Share publicly via a scholarly communication network that has not signed up to STM sharing principles ✕ ✕

⌛ Accepted manuscripts may be distributed via repositories after an embargo period of 12 months
 

 If you are a reader looking for the terms of use for information published by the Royal Society of Chemistry under our standard licence to publish please refer our terms of use.

CHORUS

We are members of the CHORUS initiative, and therefore make the Accepted manuscript version of articles describing research funded by participating funders publicly available on our web site after an embargo period of 12 months. This is effective for research published from 1st March 2018 onwards. Unless otherwise noted on the article the Accepted manuscript is licensed under the terms of our standard license to publish and is subject to our standard reuse terms.

Re-use permission requests

Material published by the Royal Society of Chemistry and other publishers is subject to all applicable copyright, database protection, and other rights. Therefore, for any publication, whether printed or electronic, permission must be obtained to use material for which the author(s) does not already own the copyright. This material may be, for example, a figure, diagram, table, photo or some other image.

Author reusing their own work published by the Royal Society of Chemistry

You do not need to request permission to reuse your own figures, diagrams, etc, that were originally published in a Royal Society of Chemistry 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 us in your thesis please ensure that your co-authors are aware of this. 

Reuse of material that was published originally by the Royal Society of Chemistry 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 'Acknowledgements'.

Material published by the Royal Society of Chemistry to be used in another of our publications

Authors contributing to our publications (journal articles, book or book chapters) do not need to formally request permission to reproduce material contained in another Royal Society of Chemistry 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.

Acknowledgements

The Royal Society of Chemistry publishes some journals in partnership with, or on behalf of, other organisations; these journals require a specific wording of the acknowledgement when work is reproduced from them. The text for the acknowledgement for these journals, and the standard wording to be used by all other journals are given below.

Standard acknowledgement

Reproduced from Ref. XX with permission from the Royal Society of Chemistry.

Non-standard acknowledgements

Reproduction of material from NJC (New Journal of Chemistry)
Reproduced from Ref. XX with permission from the Centre National de la Recherche Scientifique (CNRS) and the Royal Society of Chemistry.

Reproduction of material from Photochemical & Photobiological Sciences (PPS)
Reproduced from Ref. XX with permission from the European Society for Photobiology, the European Photochemistry Association, and the Royal Society of Chemistry.

Reproduction of material from PCCP (Physical Chemistry Chemical Physics)
Reproduced from Ref. XX with permission from the PCCP Owner Societies.

Reproduction of material from Inorganic Chemistry Frontiers
Reproduced from Ref. XX with permission from the Chinese Chemical Society (CCS), Peking University (PKU), and the Royal Society of Chemistry.

Reproduction of material from Organic Chemistry Frontiers
Reproduced from Ref. XX with permission from the Chinese Chemical Society (CCS), Shanghai Institute of Organic Chemistry (SIOC), and the Royal Society of Chemistry.

Reproduction of material from articles in the Journal Archive from Geochemical Transactions 
Reproduced from Ref. XX with permission from the American Chemical Society, Division of Geochemistry and the Royal Society of Chemistry.

Using third party material in Royal Society of Chemistry publications

We must ensure that the material we publish does not infringe the copyright of others. We require the author(s) to obtain, at the earliest opportunity, the relevant permissions that might be needed from third parties to include material that belongs to someone else.

Please contact the publisher/copyright owner of the third party material to check how they wish to receive permission requests. Please plan to submit your request well ahead of publication of your material.

The most common procedures for permission requests are outlined below.

  • A number of publishers have opted out of receiving express permissions as long as they fall under the rules of the STM Permission Guidelines.
  • If they do not fall into the category above, the majority of publishers now use RightsLink from the Copyright Clearance Center (CCC) to process their requests.
  • Other publishers have their own permission request forms and/or specify what information they need to process any permission request.
  • If the publisher/copyright owner does not have a specific procedure please complete and submit the ‘permission request form for non-RSC material’ form. Send the form to the permission administrator or editor of the relevant publication.
  • If the copyright owner has opted to publish under a Creative Commons licence, licensees are required to obtain permission to do any of the things with a work that the law reserves exclusively to a licensor and that the licence does not expressly allow. Licensees must credit the licensor, keep copyright notices intact on all copies of the work, and link to the license from copies of the work.

In all cases the following rights need to be obtained.

Permission is required to include the specified material in the work described and in all subsequent editions of the work to be published by the Royal Society of Chemistry for distribution throughout the world, in all media including electronic and microfilm and to use the material in conjunction with computer-based electronic and information retrieval systems, to grant permissions for photocopying, reproductions and reprints, to translate the material and to publish the translation, and to authorise document delivery and abstracting and indexing services.

Please note that the Royal Society of Chemistry is also a signatory to the STM Permission Guidelines.

Using material published by the Royal Society of Chemistry in material for another publisher

If you require permission to use material from one of our publications or website in a publication not owned by us, and you are not the author of our publication, the following procedures should be followed.

Before sending in any request you should check that the material you wish to reproduce is not credited to a source other than the Royal Society of Chemistry. The credit for an image will be given in the caption of the image or sometimes in the list of references. 

Please plan to submit your request well ahead of publication of your material. Please note that we are unable to supply artwork for the material you may wish to reproduce.

Reproducing material from a Royal Society of Chemistry journal

To request permission to reproduce material from a Royal Society of Chemistry journal please go to the Copyright Clearance Center. Please note that for open access articles published under a CC-BY licence no formal permission is needed as long as the reproduction includes a full acknowledgement to the Royal Society of Chemistry article. For open access articles published under a CC BY-NC article formal permission is needed to reproduce the material commercially, including but not limited to, all publishers.

How to use the Copyright Clearance Center

How to use the Copyright Clearance Center for journals

Find the journal article from which you want to reproduce material and go to the article landing page by clicking on the article's title.

Click on 'Request permissions', which will open up a new window containing permissions information for the article. If required, click on 'Formally request permission' to go to Copyright Clearance Center.

Use the drop-down menus to select the reproduction options you require and provide any additional details needed. You will obtain the permission for free if both of both the following conditions apply:

  • Your request falls within the terms of the STM Permission Guidelines (in short, up to three figures from any one journal article or a single text extract of less than 400 words).
  • You are an academic, or you are reproducing the material in a publication published by another STM Publisher (i.e. publishers who have signed up to the STM Permission Guidelines, for example, American Chemical Society, Elsevier, Springer and Wiley), or you are reproducing the material in your thesis.

After ‘Describe who will republish the content (person or entity)...’:

  • if you are an academic, choose 'Academic institution'
  • if you are reproducing the material in a publication published by an STM publisher, select 'Publisher, STM'
  • if you are reproducing the figure in a thesis or dissertation, please specify 'Academic institution'.

When your order has been accepted you will be sent an email providing the order confirmation and any licence details.

Reproducing material from other Royal Society of Chemistry publications

If you are reproducing material from a Royal Society of Chemistry book, education or science policy publication or a Royal Society of Chemistry website you must complete and submit the online permission request form (or the PDF version of the permission request form for Royal Society of Chemistry material).

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 Royal Society of Chemistry article or chapter may be granted in special circumstances.

The permission form should only be used to request permission to reproduce material from Royal Society of Chemistry books, Chemistry World, Education in Chemistry, and other non-journal publications of the Royal Society of Chemistry. For these requests please complete and send the form to our publishing services team.

Journals, books & databases

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Customer Services team

For general publishing and open access enquiries.
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