DALMEET SINGH CHAWLA, Chemistry World ; Thousands of published studies may contain images with incorrect copyright licences
"More than 9000 studies published in open-access journals may contain figures published under the wrong copyright licence.
These open-access journals publish content under the CC-BY copyright licence, which means that anyone can copy, distribute or transmit that work including for commercial purposes as long as the original creator is credited.
All the 9000+ studies contain figures created using the commercial scientific illustration service BioRender, which should technically mean that these are also available for free reuse. But that doesn’t appear to be the case.
When Simon Dürr, a computational enzymologist at the Swiss Federal Institute of Technology Lausanne in Switzerland, reached out to BioRender to ask if two figures produced using BioRender by the authors of both studies were free to reuse, he was told that they weren’t. The company said it would approach both journals and ask them to issue corrections.
Dürr runs an open-source, free-to-use competitor to BioRender called BioIcons and wanted to host figures produced using BioRender that were published in open access journals because he thought they would be free to use. According to Dürr, he followed up with BioRender near the end of 2023, flagging a total of 9277 academic papers published under the CC-BY copyright licence but never heard back on their copyright status. In total, Dürr says he found 12,059 papers if one includes other copyright licences that restrict commercial use or have other similar conditions."
