Once you come to write up your research findings in a thesis for example, you will most likely want to include quotes from the sources you have consulted. As long as these are ‘insubstantial’ you do not need to seek permission. So you can include:
- Brief quotes – as long as you cite the source of the material;
- Short passages for the purpose of criticism or review.
The guidelines from publishers suggest that you can quote a single extract of up to 400 words or a series of extracts up to 800 words in total but in blocks of up to 300 words each. In the case of a poem the guidelines say that you can quote up to 40 lines or up to 25% of the poem, whichever is the smaller number of lines. In all cases you must give the correct citation to the source used.If you want to include longer passages or the whole of another work, eg a technical specification sheet for a component supplied to you by a manufacturer, then you should definitely seek the permission of the rights holder to let you include it in your work.
To make sure that you are citing your sources correctly, you can get lots of advice at:
There are a few other matters you need to take into consideration.
Text copied from web pages or other internet sources will almost certainly be covered by copyright laws no matter where it originates. If you want to quote material from such a source, be very careful to check whether or not the author of the page is the copyright holder, and look to see if there are any pages telling you what you can and cannot copy without permission. Also, when you cite an Internet source always include the date on when you copied the material as well as the URL or other source identifier.
Illustrations, whether they are in a book, journal or on a web page, will have copyright that is separate from the text next to them, although the rights holder for the text and the illustration might well be the same. It is also difficult to determine what is an ‘insubstantial’ part of an illustration. Therefore, it is always a good idea to get the permission of the rights holder when you want to include an illustration in your work.
Finally, there is a move now to ensure that as many theses and dissertations are available to other researchers through ‘electronic repositories’. So when you seek permission from a rights holder to include their material in your work, you should make it clear to them that you are also seeking permission for it to appear in electronic format in a repository.
Illustrations give lots of problems. For an on-line tutorial on searching for images that can be used in your work that are out of copyright or 'copyright-cleared' and free for you to use, see: