Reusing figures from books

[Arnab Rudra]

Today, our OTP author Suman Bhattacharjee asked whether he can reuse figures from books. I am posting the policy of Padakshep here for others to see. As we have clearly mentioned in the FAQs, we cannot allow any figure directly copied from textbooks or websites which are not under at least CC BY-NC-SA 3.0 license to be published on this website. The source book or website must explicitly give the OTP author permission to use this for non-commercial/non-profit use for educational purpose. 

Even though, this may sound depressing to many of you, I can assure you there are many websites which do offer such license for free. I am listing couple of them. Please let me know if you get information about similar websites which allow reuse of figures/diagrams. Here I am mentioning only for biology as Suman is writing on biology.

• http://www.nature.com/scitable
  
• http://www.ebi.ac.uk/pdbe/ (you have to mention the source)
  
• A sample biological figure for reuse under same license (Wikipedia)
  
• Nature journals (they allow free reuse for nonprofit educational purposes)
  
• Possibly many other well known journals.