Nature Cover
francis niestemski
Friday, 28 September 2007 20:26 UTC
I have been invited to submit a cover suggestion along with a letter and I have a question: Would a problem exist if my cover was, for example, a picture of the mona lisa which I modified to be wearing a lab coat and taking data of some sort. I’m not asking if anyone thinks that is a great idea but rather if there is some copyright or other legal problems with including a famous modified piece of art in a cover submission.
Thanks,
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Replies
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In general, journals need to be careful of copyright issues surrounding images. Your suggestion reminded me of a Leonardo-inspired cover for a special issue of Nature Immunology in 2003. To use that image, the journal needed to sign an agreement and pay a fee. Altering such images without doing so can sometimes infringe copyright.
For all of these reasons, it is much simpler to use new images that an author creates.
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At Nature we receive many suggestions and offers of cover art from authors of research papers, and we have a strong preference for a scientific image that relates to a particular paper, rather than something along the lines of an “invented” image as proposed here.
Nature has a large magazine section at the front of the journal, featuring News, Book Reviews and other commentary on topical scientific issues. The editors of these sections of the journal are also, as well as the authors of scientific research papers, “pitching” to be selected for the cover. For Nature, therefore, we would tend to create ourselves a pictorial representative image to highlight this “secondary” content (see our science-fiction cover of 7 July 2007, for example), and would tend to choose a pure image (a cell, astrononmical object, a structure or an organism, say) from an author of a research paper and work with that to create a cover, as a representation of “real” science.
That having been said, Nature itself is the Nature journal with the greatest quantity of “secondary” scientific content. If you are publishing in a Nature journal without so many news and comment articles, the journal might be more likely to like a cover idea such as the one described. However, as Linda writes, it is the author’s responsibility to ensure that relevant copyright permission has been obtained, and to provide that information to the editors when submitting cover art. Copyright fees for covers can be very large (as all our journals are online as well as print, this increases the fees considerably), so we’d need to be convinced that an expensive suggestion really is a lot better than all the other suggestions we receive from other authors! -
@Francis,
Check out this link.
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The (satirical) site to which Graham points has nothing to do with Nature journals or Nature Publishing Group. As Linda points out above, Nature Publishing Group paid the appropriate fee for the Nature Immunology Leonardo-inspired cover.
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Absolutely Maxine.
Welcome to my sense of humour….
Graham
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Thanks, Graham, even editors have a sense of humour, I promise. But as this thread is in an “ask the Nature editor” forum to help people submitting their manuscripts to our journals, I want to be crystal clear to other readers that your link is not connected to Nature journals and not “on topic” for this particular forum, amusing though it might be;-) .
Best wishes, Maxine.
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