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I am writing an epidemiology paper for an academic journal, and would like to have a figure showing the map of a geographical region of interest.

My current map was generated with OpenStreetMap data, from the get_stamenmap function provided by the ggmap package in R.

However, such maps have copyrights, and they won't be accepted by most academic journals I am interested in publishing in. Does anyone know some good tools to produce pretty, copyright-free maps and possibly programmatically? Bonus points if they are produced through R.

I would also appreciate any other map-related hints or suggestions.

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  • You can google "copyright free maps". Are there features missing from these that you must have?
    – GEdgar
    Commented Aug 16, 2023 at 11:23
  • Thanks for the answer! I would like to add some pins to the maps at custom (latitude, longitude) cohordinates. Ideally this would be done programmatically, but in the worst case scenario I could manually add them
    – A-B-izi
    Commented Aug 16, 2023 at 12:07
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    Having to credit someone is very unlikely to be a bar to publishing. I would make sure this is actually the case
    – Nicolas Formichella
    Commented Aug 16, 2023 at 13:38
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    I agree fully with @NicolasFormichella - OpenStreetMaps tells you what you do to use a map generated using their data. You credit it in a footnote as they state. Perhaps you should (a) see how other people's maps are created/credited, and (b) ask the journal how they want it handled.
    – Jon Custer
    Commented Aug 16, 2023 at 13:51
  • There is even an example in the copyright page, on how to fullfil the credit requirement for printed works
    – Nicolas Formichella
    Commented Aug 16, 2023 at 15:22

2 Answers 2

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As noted in the comments, this is a non-issue because Openstreetmap allows reusing maps with the only requirement to add a notice, for instance in a footnote or in the acknowledgments. So OP can continue using those maps, and they will be accepted by academic journals.

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Leaflet is an OpenSource JavaScript Library to make and publish maps. You can use Leaflet through Python using folium library or with R.

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  • Leaflet will still need to source data, so attribution/copyright is still an issue.
    – mkennedy
    Commented Aug 16, 2023 at 23:30

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