2.3 Permissions and fees

The trends toward temporal and conceptual copyright extension have made it more difficult for scholars totake their own publishable photographs of works of art (once a quite standard practice, but now virtually unheard of in museums),and they have caused increases in permissions fees even for non-profit, scholarly publications of limited public reach.Permission fees have traditionally been based on several factors, including character of the publication and press (academic orcommercial), color or black-and-white, size of image relative to page, placement inside or on cover, geographic and linguistic rangeof distribution, and size of print run. With digital images, color vs. black-and-white and size are no longer crucial considerations,and with online publication, internet marketing, and the globalization of book sales, geographic and linguistic range ofdistribution has also become less relevant. Most publishers now require their authors to obtain worldwide reproduction rights forall images in a publication.

Research into image and permission costs for reproductions of works of art in museums, libraries, and imagebanks suggest that most non-profit institutions are mindful of the difference between scholarly and commercial purpose, and discountlicensing fees accordingly. Image banks tend to be less generous in this regard. (It is well known to scholars that most commercialinstitutions that own copyrights, such as magazines and newspapers, are not set up to grant special dispensations for scholarlypublication, however well-intended they may be, and these special cases are left out of consideration here.

Most non-profit institutions appear to aim their fees at cost recovery, but it is unclear to what extentinstitutions have analyzed the full costs of maintaining rights and reproduction departments or of the fulfillment of scholars'requests. Although prices of scholarly publication licenses are often finely matched to different genres, media, and audiences ofpublication, there appear to be enormous inconsistencies in fee structures between institutions. Aware of these discrepancies, theRegistrars Committee of the American Association of Museums in 2004 produced a wide-ranging survey of rights and reproductionspractices among 111 of its member organizations, the vast majority of them art museums.