Do I Need Permission to Use a Published Figure in My Thesis? (Canada, 2026)

Sometimes. Section 29 of the Copyright Act says fair dealing for research, private study, education, parody or satire does not infringe copyright, and that can cover a figure you are genuinely analysing. It does not cover a figure you are using to decorate a chapter. Where the dealing is not fair, you need written permission — and your university makes that judgment your responsibility, not the library’s.

Below: what the Act actually says, the eight categories that usually need permission, how to ask, and the exact wording to use when permission is refused. Rules differ by faculty and by school of graduate studies, so confirm against your own institution’s thesis guide before you deposit.

What does the Copyright Act actually say?

Two sections do the work. The wording below is quoted from the consolidated Act on the Justice Laws website, current to 17 June 2026 and last amended 7 November 2024.

29 Fair dealing for the purpose of research, private study, education, parody or satire does not infringe copyright.

29.1 Fair dealing for the purpose of criticism or review does not infringe copyright if the following are mentioned: (a) the source; and (b) if given in the source, the name of the author…

Notice the structure. Section 29 is not a permission slip that switches on because you are a student. It sets out purposes, and the dealing must additionally be fair. Fairness is a separate question, and it is the one that decides your case.

What makes a dealing “fair”?

The Supreme Court of Canada set out a six-factor analysis that Canadian universities now apply directly. UBC’s copyright guidance for graduate students lists them as:

1. The purpose of the copying — research, private study, education, satire, parody, criticism, review or news reporting.
2. The character of the copying — single or multiple copies, and whether the copy is destroyed after use.
3. The amount of the dealing from the user’s perspective — the proportion of the work copied and the importance of that excerpt to the whole, containing “no more of the work than is required” for the purpose.
4. Alternatives to copying — whether a non-copyrighted equivalent exists.
5. The nature of the work — including whether it is published or unpublished.
6. The effect of the copying — whether the copy competes with the commercial market of the original.

Two things follow that most students do not expect.

First, a whole figure is a whole work. UBC’s guidance states plainly that copying any important part of a painting, graph or table is a “substantial” portion, and that because you are typically using the whole of an image rather than an excerpt, you should be particularly careful in your fair dealing analysis or obtain permission.

Second, and this is the sentence to remember: fair dealing “should never be used merely for illustrative purposes or enhancing the content of the thesis without engaging with the third-party copyrighted materials for the fair dealing purposes listed above.” If your chapter reproduces someone’s model diagram and then does not discuss it, you are decorating, and decoration is not one of the listed purposes.

Is there Canadian case law that settles this?

No, and that absence is worth knowing. UBC’s own guidance states that there is no specific Canadian case law on how the six-factor test would apply to third-party content in theses that are freely distributed on the internet, or on what kind of copying would be permitted.

That is the whole difficulty in one sentence. Your thesis is not a private study copy any more. It goes into your university’s public repository and to Library and Archives Canada, which means the “character” and “effect” factors are being assessed against a globally published document. Anyone who tells you the answer is settled is guessing.

Which materials usually need written permission?

UBC’s list of things to seek permission for, where you are unsure whether fair dealing applies, is the most complete published in Canada. Eight categories:

1. Images of any form from copyrighted sources — tables, figures, maps, graphs, photographs, screenshots, drawings, logos and video screen captures, taken from websites, newspapers, journals, books, brochures or a professor’s lecture notes.
2. Long quotations or excerpts from any one source — books, journals, newspapers, magazines, short stories, plays, poems.
3. Articles you wrote and previously published in a journal to which you assigned copyright. Publishing agreements commonly require that assignment, which means the article is no longer yours to reuse freely.
4. Material co-authored with others. Each co-author shares copyright and must consent.
5. Scripts and recordings of any performance.
6. Translations of copyrighted work.
7. Testing instruments — standardized tests, questionnaires, forms and surveys.
8. Anything else. The list is explicitly not exhaustive.

Number seven catches more theses than any other item on this list. If you administered a validated scale, reproducing the full item set in an appendix is reproducing a copyrighted instrument, and many publishers licence those instruments commercially. Check the licence you agreed to when you obtained the scale, before you paste it into Appendix B. This is a separate question from whether the scale performed well in your sample — for that, see our guide to acceptable Cronbach’s alpha values.

Does citing the source count as permission?

No. These are two different obligations and they are enforced by different people.

• Citation is an academic-integrity duty owed to your committee. It prevents plagiarism.
• Permission is a legal question owed to the copyright owner. It prevents infringement.

A perfectly cited figure can still infringe, and a licensed figure still has to be cited. Our complete APA 7 guide for a Canadian thesis covers the citation half; nothing in it satisfies the permission half.

The same distinction explains a question students ask constantly: a long, correctly quoted passage still appears in a similarity report, because similarity software measures textual overlap, not permission or attribution — which is one of several reasons the similarity percentage answers a different question than the one you are asking.

Does modifying the figure remove the problem?

No. UBC’s guidance is explicit: altering an image does not necessarily remove the need to seek permission, nor change the fair dealing analysis. The alterations it names specifically are cropping, re-sizing, modifying colours, and annotating with text, arrows or other visual call-outs.

Redrawing a figure from scratch using the underlying data is a genuinely different act, because facts and data are not themselves protected by copyright in the way an expressive arrangement is — but the safe version is to redraw from the numbers, cite the data source, and describe what you did in the caption.

What about something I found on Google Images?

Being publicly available is not a licence. Copyright protection arises the moment a work is created, with no registration and no © symbol required, so an image found on the web is treated exactly like one distributed in print. Check the site’s terms of use or licence statement before assuming anything.

In Canada, copyright generally expires 70 years after the death of the author, regardless of who holds the copyright. Anything older than that is in the public domain and you may use it freely, though you still cite it.

How do I actually ask?

The process is short. The waiting is not — start early.

1. Identify the owner. Look for the © symbol, usually at the front of a book, beside a photograph, or at the foot of a web page. The name next to it is who you write to, and it is frequently neither the author nor the journal.
2. Try the Copyright Clearance Center first for commercial publishers. It handles permissions for a large number of publishers, and permission to include images in a thesis can often be obtained through it swiftly and at no cost.
3. Otherwise, go to the publisher’s or journal’s “Rights and Permissions” page. Some journals grant advance permission for specific uses or to their own authors; some list uses that are specifically prohibited.
4. Write the request properly. Say who you are and that this is a thesis for a degree; identify the work exactly, with figure or table number and page; describe how you will use it; and — this is the part students omit — tell the owner that your thesis will be publicly available in your university’s online repository and that you will be granting non-exclusive licences to your university and to Library and Archives Canada. A permission granted without that disclosure is not a permission for what you are actually doing.
5. Ask for a reply by a date, and offer to send a copy of the finished work.
6. Keep the evidence. Email is acceptable proof. If permission appears on a web page, save or print the page — a saved link is not sufficient, because links break and pages change. Keep the correspondence for your own records; do not bind it into the thesis.

If you also intend to publish a chapter as an article later, ask for that at the same time. Some publishers will not accept material used under fair dealing and require permission before publication even where your university would have accepted the fair dealing analysis.

What if permission is refused, costs money, or nobody replies?

You have two options, and a required form of words for the second.

Option one: replace it. Substitute a work that is in the public domain, carries a Creative Commons licence, or for which permission is obtainable.

Option two: remove it and say so. Removal is acceptable where permission was denied, where a fee would be charged, or where there was no response after a reasonable effort to make contact. Where you remove something you must insert three things in its place:

• a statement that the material has been removed because of copyright restrictions;
• a description of the material and the information it contained, plus a link to an online source if one exists;
• a full citation of the original source.

UBC publishes a worked example of the resulting note:

Figure 3 has been removed due to copyright restrictions. It was a diagram of the apparatus used in performing the experiment, showing the changes made by the investigating team. Original source: Wu, G. and Thompson, J.R. (2008) Effect of Ketone Bodies on Dairy Cattle. Biochem J. 255:139-144.

The description matters more than it looks. It lets an examiner follow your argument without going to find the original, which is the difference between a gap and a hole.

How should the caption be written when I do have permission?

Include a full citation regardless of source, and add three elements to it: the copyright symbol, the name of the copyright owner — who may not be the author — and, where applicable, a statement that the use or adaptation is by permission. UBC’s own examples:

• Image title (© 2001 Jane Doe, by permission)
• Graph Title (© 2003 John Smith, adapted with permission)
• Testing Instrument Title (© 2007 Company Name, by permission)

When should I start this?

Before you write the chapter, not before you deposit. Permission requests are answered on the copyright owner’s timetable, and a refusal received two weeks before your deposit deadline forces a rewrite of whatever argument depended on the figure.

The practical sequence that avoids that:

1. As you draft, keep one row per third-party item: what it is, where it came from, who owns it, and whether you are relying on fair dealing or on permission.
2. Send every permission request in one batch as soon as the chapter’s structure is stable.
3. Re-run the list before deposit, because chapters gain figures during revision and nobody remembers adding them.

That list is also the fastest way to answer your graduate school’s copyright declaration, which most Canadian institutions now require at deposit. Build your chapters in Tesify — figures, captions and references stay attached to their sources through every revision, while the argument remains 100% yours.

Frequently asked questions

Do I need permission to use a published figure in my thesis?

Only if your use is not fair dealing. Fair dealing can cover a figure you genuinely analyse for research, criticism or review, and does not cover one included to illustrate or decorate. Where it does not apply, you need written permission from the copyright owner.

Does citing the figure mean I do not need permission?

No. Citation and permission are different duties. A correctly cited figure can still infringe copyright, and a licensed figure must still be cited.

Can I use a figure if I redraw it?

Redrawing from the underlying data and citing the data source is a different act from reproducing the original image. Merely cropping, resizing, recolouring or annotating the original does not remove the need for permission.

Do I need permission for my own published article?

Often yes, because academic publishing agreements commonly assign copyright to the publisher. Check your agreement or the publisher’s thesis-reuse policy, and get your co-authors’ consent separately.

Do I need permission to reproduce a questionnaire?

Standardized tests, questionnaires, forms and surveys are on the standard list of materials requiring permission. Check the licence under which you obtained the instrument before reproducing it in an appendix.

Is an image from Google free to use?

No. Copyright arises on creation without registration or a © symbol, so material on the web is protected like anything else. Read the site’s terms of use.

How long does copyright last in Canada?

Generally 70 years after the death of the author, regardless of who holds the copyright.

How much does permission cost?

Frequently nothing for thesis use, particularly through the Copyright Clearance Center, but a fee is possible. If one is charged, you may remove the material and insert the standard removal note instead.

What do I write if I have to remove a figure?

A statement that it was removed for copyright reasons, a description of what it showed with a link if one exists, and a full citation of the original source.

Does my university check this for me?

No. Canadian graduate schools place responsibility on the student and require a declaration at deposit; the library can advise but cannot give you legal advice or clear your thesis.

Is there Canadian case law on figures in online theses?

No. There is no specific Canadian case law on how the six-factor fair dealing test applies to third-party content in theses distributed freely on the internet.

How early should I request permission?

As soon as the chapter’s structure is stable. Owners answer on their own schedule, and a late refusal forces you to rewrite the argument the figure was carrying.