Purpose and Scope
This policy governs third-party material included in manuscripts and published content, including figures, tables, photographs, maps, questionnaires, scales, illustrations, screenshots, substantial text extracts, multimedia, datasets, and other material for which the submitting authors may not control all relevant rights.
Authors are responsible for identifying third-party material and determining whether permission, a license, an exception, or another lawful basis is required for the intended publication and distribution.
Permission and Scholarly Attribution
Legal permission and scholarly attribution are related but distinct obligations. Permission to reproduce a work does not eliminate the need to credit its source, while citation alone does not necessarily provide legal authorization to reproduce protected material.
Authors should satisfy both requirements where applicable and should not represent third-party content as their own original work.
Licensed and Openly Available Material
Material distributed under an open or standardized license may be reusable without individual permission when the proposed use complies with the license conditions. Authors should verify the exact license, version, attribution requirements, and any restrictions before submission.
Material that is freely accessible online is not necessarily free of copyright or other rights restrictions.
Adaptations and Modifications
Adapted figures, translations, redrawn diagrams, modified instruments, or other derivative material may still require permission depending on the underlying rights and applicable law. Authors should identify adaptations transparently and credit the original source.
Modification should not be used to obscure the provenance of third-party content or to imply that a protected work has become entirely original through minor changes.
Photographs, People and Privacy
Photographs and multimedia can involve copyright, privacy, publicity, consent, and ethical obligations simultaneously. Permission from a photographer or rights holder does not necessarily constitute consent from an identifiable participant or patient for publication.
Human images must therefore also comply with Treata requirements for consent and participant privacy.
Research Instruments, Scales and Proprietary Materials
Questionnaires, psychometric scales, diagnostic instruments, software interfaces, maps, commercial databases, and similar materials may have contractual or licensing restrictions even when they are commonly used in research.
Authors should not reproduce such material in full merely because it was used lawfully in the study. Publication rights should be assessed separately.
Permission Documentation
Journals may request evidence of permission, license terms, correspondence, or other documentation before publication. Documentation should identify the material and the permitted use sufficiently to support editorial and production decisions.
Sensitive contractual information should be handled appropriately and need not be made public merely because it was reviewed by the journal.
Credit Lines and License Exclusions
Third-party material may need a specific credit line or may be excluded from the general license applied to an open-access article. Such exclusions should be made visible enough that readers are not misled about reuse rights.
Article-level license information should not imply that Treata grants rights it does not possess.
Rights Concerns After Publication
If a credible rights complaint arises after publication, the journal may request evidence, correct attribution, replace material, restrict access to the disputed item, or take another proportionate action while the issue is assessed.
Removal of an entire article should be exceptional when a more targeted correction or restriction can address the rights issue without unnecessarily disrupting the scholarly record.
Journal Implementation and Version Control
This policy is publisher mandatory. Journals may provide discipline-specific permissions guidance and production requirements, but they should not weaken the obligation to respect third-party rights and scholarly attribution.
Material changes should be versioned and preserved.
Version Control
Version 1.0. This page is the canonical publisher-level text for the current version. Material revisions should be versioned and dated, while superseded versions remain identifiable so historical applicability can be determined.