Friday, June 30, 2006

Powerpoint slides from Nature and others do not give full credit to the sources of images

Well, I browsed around the Nature web site and did some searches for terms like "Reprinted with permission" and then looked at how they handled Figures that were reprinted from other places. I found some additional examples where the Figure image did not seem to do a complete job of crediting the source of the material. But without a doubt the most disturbing thing I found is that you can download powerpoint slides of the figures and all the ones I looked at only had "Copyright Nature" or something like that and no information crediting the actual source of the material. This is basically because they do not include the Figure legends on the ppt slides. I am not sure if technically they are allowed to do this in some cases (my gut feeling is there is something wrong with what they are doing) but it could not be that hard to include the Figure legend on the ppt slides, even in small font. They certainly are able to inlcude their "Copyright Nature" in large font. But even if technically they are allowed to do this, they should not.

Some examples:
  • Download the powerpoint slide of Figure 1 or Figure 4 from a paper on Listeria in Nature Reviews Microbiology if you have access to it here.
  • Or look at Figure 1 of a paper in Nature Reviews Genetics here.
I guess I could load up here on other examples, but it might be more interesting for people to find their own.

Here is how I found these.
  1. Go to the Nature Advanced Search page here
  2. Search for terms like "Reproduced with permission" --- I used the "The exact phrase" option.
  3. Browse away
I assume that this is not a purposeful thing they do, but it certainly seems pervasive there.
Unfortunately, it seems common in other places. For example, PNAS provides powerpoint slides but does not include Figure legends with them either. Look here. So - not trying to single out Nature here but that was where I looked first. It seems that many publishers are trying to hard to provide material (e.g., powerpoint slides) without being careful enough attributing the original sources.

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