Your copyright
Like most academic, scholarly, and professional publishers, ILA requires that authors assign their copyright to us when their material is accepted for publication. This allows us to protect authors' work and to manage requests from others who seek to use it. We do not restrict authors' use or re-use of their own material. Authors interested in ILA's policies regarding reprinting and other reuse should visit the Rights and Permissions page of this website.
In order to assign copyright, authors must guarantee that:
- Their work is original
- They hold the rights to this work
- This work has not been published previously, either in whole or in part
- No other agreement exists to publish the work in whole or in part
Journal article authors should complete and return a copyright transfer agreement.
Book authors are required to sign and return an ILA copyright transfer agreement or a book contract that includes copyright assignment.
Using work from other sources
If your submission to ILA's publishing program includes material from other copyrighted sources, you must supply ILA with written permission from the copyright holder to include this material in your work. A sample form is available to use for requesting permission (particularly from another publisher).
Fair use: Permission releases are not required in cases of "fair use." To determine whether your intended use falls into this category, you must consider:
- The purpose and character of the intended use (i.e., commercial or nonprofit)
- The nature of the copyrighted work from which you intend to reproduce material
- The amount and "substantiality" of the portion of text in relation to the entire work (e.g., one line from a haiku versus one line from an epic poem)
- The effect the use might have on the marketability of the copyrighted work
Although fair use is frequently interpreted broadly in education and educational publishing, it cannot be assumed that your use falls into this category simply because you plan to reproduce the material for educational purposes or because it is fairly brief.
For more information on fair use, please see the U.S. Copyright Office or resources such as Copyright & Fair Use from the Stanford University Libraries.
Reproducing material from Internet sources: Websites are considered published works and are protected by copyright. If you intend to capture screen images or reproduce text or graphics from a website in your own work, you must obtain permission to do so from the copyright holder. If no copyright information is provided on the website, contact the site owner or administrator about your request.
Please note that it is not necessary to obtain permission to include a website URL in a printed work or include a link in an online work.
Permission to use unpublished work: Please note that U.S. copyright law (by which ILA is governed) has deemed that any expression "fixed in a tangible medium" is copyrighted. This means that student or adult writing samples, artwork, and so on are under copyright protection, regardless of whether they have been formally published or if the copyright symbol appears on the material. Authors must therefore obtain permission to use such material. Sample release forms for children and adults are available.
Limitations of IRB releases: For those whose work derives from research undertaken under guidelines or requirements of academic institutional review boards, please note that agreement of participation and guarantee of participant anonymity is not sufficient to allow publication of student or adult work collected as data. In order to publish such material in these circumstances, we must be assured that appropriate permission has been obtained.
A word about privacy: In addition to these copyright considerations, authors who wish to use student or teacher material need to be mindful of privacy concerns. For student work samples, ILA requires the signature of a parent or guardian. Further more, unless releases have been obtained to use real names, authors must use pseudonyms for the names of students, teachers, or schools.
Also, if images of people are shown or if people are discussed or described in such a way that they may be recognizable, ILA requires that signed releases be obtained — from the person depicted in the case of adults or from a parent/guardian in the case of children. Releases also are required to reproduce individuals' voices in audio files. In obtaining such permission, please ensure that it is understood that ILA publishes articles and chapters both in print and online.