Figure Licence & Copyright

Figures, tables, and images are published under the Creative Commons Attribution (CC BY) license.

Do not submit any figures, photos, tables, or other works that have been previously copyrighted or that contain proprietary data unless you have and can supply written permission from the copyright holder to use that content.

This includes:

  • maps and satellite images
  • slogans and logos
  • social media content

When preparing figures, please follow the formatting instructions below.

  • Figures should be numbered in the order they are first mentioned in the text, and uploaded in this order. Multi-panel figures (those with parts a, b, c, d etc.) should be submitted as a single composite file that contains all parts of the figure.
  • Figures should be uploaded in the correct orientation.
  • Figure titles (max 15 words) and legends (max 300 words) should be provided in the main manuscript, not in the graphic file and should be in english.
  • Figure keys should be incorporated into the graphic, not into the legend of the figure.
  • Each figure should be closely cropped to minimize the amount of white space surrounding the illustration. Cropping figures improves accuracy when placing the figure in combination with other elements when the accepted manuscript is prepared for publication on our site. For more information on individual figure file formats, see our detailed instructions.
  • Individual figure files should not exceed 10 MB. If a suitable format is chosen, this file size is adequate for extremely high quality figures.
  • Please note that it is the responsibility of the author(s) to obtain permission from the copyright holder to reproduce figures (or tables) that have previously been published elsewhere. In order for all figures to be open access, authors must have permission from the rights holder if they wish to include images that have been published elsewhere in non open access journals. Permission should be indicated in the figure legend, and the original source included in the reference list.

Figure file types

We accept the following file formats for figures:

  • EPS (suitable for diagrams and/or images)
  • PDF (suitable for diagrams and/or images)
  • Microsoft Word (suitable for diagrams and/or images, figures must be a single page)
  • PowerPoint (suitable for diagrams and/or images, figures must be a single page)
  • TIFF (suitable for images)
  • JPEG (suitable for photographic images, less suitable for graphical images)
  • PNG (suitable for images)

Read the full licenses and copyright policy.​

Reproduction Request

All articles published by BAE are licensed under the Creative Commons Attribution 4.0 License (see details above) together with an author copyright. Therefore, there is no need from the publisher’s side to give permission for the reproduction of articles. We suggest contacting the author to inform him/her about the further usage of the material. However, as the author decided to publish the scientific results under the CC-BY licence, he/she consented to share the work under the condition that the original authors be given credit.