I'm working on a non-academic book that cites from many academic resources. I make heavy use of figures in my book and many of them are copyrighted, either by the authors or the journals. My experience thus far has been that I'm unable to secure permissions from the journals without paying a prohibitive cost. For more complex and creative figures, I've chosen to just not include them.
However, for very simple figures, which are essentially just scatterplots with regression lines - I want to know what really is copyrighted? And if my figures do infringe upon copyright, how else I could possibly present the data in a graphical form? I obviously wouldn't copy-paste the figure directly, but I want to understand if the below example would infringe upon copyright.
(Note that I've seen similar questions on here, but none that include a direct example)
Theirs:
Mine:
