The Advanced Photon Source
a U.S. Department of Energy Office of Science User Facility

Reusing figures/tables from your own previous publication

Q: I’m working on a review paper and I would like to be able to use figures and tables I’ve published in previous papers.  Am I allowed to do that?  If not, what is the procedure? 

A: From the PANDA team: Many but not all publishers permit the author to reuse figures and tables published previously by the author.  It depends upon the terms of the copyright agreement that was signed for the original publication.  If you kept copies of the previous copyright transfer agreements or if they are new enough to be housed in PANDA (http://inside.anl.gov/tools/applications/panda) you could check the terms for the previous articles.  If not, then submit the new publication via PANDA, add a comment on the comments tab stating that the figures you are using came from your previous publications.  The PANDA team has begun building a list of which publishers allow reuse and when they check the cited references for the figures they can let you know if there is a problem.  If there is an issue then you would have to reach out to the previous publisher and ask permission.