Am I allowed to post screenshots of tables/figures of my paper on Twitter?

Question

I always share my research on twitter and like to summarize my results in a short thread. In these threads, I usually add screenshots of figures or tables showing the results. However, I was wondering: what if my paper is not open access - am I still allowed to share these screenshots?

Answer 1

This is a quite interesting question. I have to admit I do the same thing (as do many others) and never really considered the copyright implications until now.

Practically speaking: yes, you can almost certainly do it. Many people do it, the administrative staff of publishers is often aware and frequently openly encourages any talk about your paper on social media, including the posting of snippets or figures (especially if accompanied by a link to the published manuscript). In the grand scheme of things the free marketing value almost certainly vastly exceeds any potentially lost business from paid article downloads (which aren't even the primary source of income for most publishers to start with). What I am trying to say is that even if posting outtakes of your paper is against the copyright agreement with the publisher (which is not entirely clear, see below), the publisher doesn't have much incentive to take action against it, and I am at least not aware of any case of a publisher taking action. Doing so would also be spectacularly bad marketing for attracting future contributions.

Purely from a copyright point of view: it really depends on what agreement you have signed with the publisher upon paper acceptance, and what you are sharing.

In my (non-lawyer) opinion sharing summaries of papers has to be ok all the time, since ideas cannot be protected (only the specific words and representations in the paper). For figures, tables, screeenshots, or long direct quotations the story may be different.

As for the agreement: the agreements of different publishers vary, and some publishers even let you select among different copyright models. For example, ACM offers (next to their open access model) two different closed-access models, one where you transfer copyright to them and one where you retain copyright but offer them an exclusive license to print, distribute, and sell your article free of charge. For the latter, you are definitionally in the clear, since the copyright for your article stays with you (and you are free to do whatever you want with your material, except give some other entity a similar license to the one you have given ACM). For the former, it's a bit less clear to me, and will depend on whether what you share could still count as fair use - small quotations and key results should be ok, but entire tables might be stretching the fair use argument.