Creating an academic poster

Academic posters

What sort of copyright issues do I need to think about?

The Canadian Copyright Act changed in 2012. Now, if you are going to share your poster electronically, e.g. put it on a website or submit it to an online collection, you must ensure that all aspects of your poster follow Copyright Law. If your poster will be used only at conferences and no images of it will appear online, you don’t need to pay attention to this section, although doing so would demonstrate excellent academic integrity.

• If you are going to use images from the internet, you should use images that have a Creative Commons license, e.g. Pixabay. Cite where the image comes from and the kind of license it has. Be aware that American sites will state that you don’t need to say where the image came from, but in Canada, you need to cite all images
• If you use your own images, provide copyright information: the year it was taken or produced, and your name
• For other images, see the Canadian Copyright Act to understand your responsibilities, what is usable, and how to cite certain usable images
• If you have sensitive data on your poster, you will want to ensure that no images are taken of your poster and that it is not shared online. You can write this on the poster itself and/or put a sign out in front stating that no photographs should be taken.