In any other work that you’re sharing publicly (whether in a published article or grant proposal, or just on your blog or other social media), you have multiple options for using images ethically and legally:
- Make an image yourself. Take a photo, draw a picture, create a chart or graph, whatever.
- Find an image that has been licensed for use by its creator. Creative Commons (CC) licensing is one popular form of licensing for use, and it’s easy to search for CC-licensed materials in Flickr and elsewhere. Give credit clearly and appropriately, in a way that honors the license. Typically, that involves crediting the creator, linking back to—or, in print, including the URL of—the image where the creator is sharing it, and indicating the particular CC license by which it was made available.
- Find an image that’s in the public domain (typically because it’s old enough to have entered the public domain by US copyright law, but sometimes because its creator decided to make it that way—or because it was created by the US government). Give credit clearly and appropriately.
If you use Firefox, Chrome, or Opera, you may find the free plugin OpenAttribute super-helpful for creating accurate, easy attributions for CC-licensed images.
