Hey there!
We’ve heard the recent concerns from our customers regarding figure ownership, the ability to publish in Open Access journals, and the first author citation requirement for publications. To address these, we’ve made important enhancements to our publication and citation requirements, as well as updates to the associated terms.
These updates are meant to improve your experience with BioRender and are effective as of September 5, 2024. You don’t need to do anything differently — just continue using BioRender, and you’ll start benefiting from these improvements automatically. By continuing to use BioRender, you’re agreeing to these changes.
We have updated our Terms of Service, Academic License Terms, Industry License Terms, Basic License Terms, User Content Terms and Help Center articles as described below.
All BioRender customers/users will need to follow our new publication and citation requirements if you would like to publish your Completed Graphics.
Summary of Changes:
CITATIONS AND OPEN ACCESS PUBLICATIONS: We have updated all of our License Terms and Help Center articles to refer to and describe our new citation requirement for publishing a Completed Graphic. In short, by following the new citation requirement, you may publish your Completed Graphic in an article submitted to journals, such as Open-Access journals that are subject to CC-BY licensing.
- You’ll need to generate a Publication License in the BioRender webapp and use the citation provided in the Publication License in the article (as a figure caption or footnote).
- This new citation requirement now gives a BioRender user more control over their figures when they publish them in an article that allows further sharing (such as Open-Access articles).
- Read more about the Publication License and new citation workflow in our Help Center article here: Citing BioRender
FIGURE OWNERSHIP CLARIFICATION: We have added plain English commentary for our Basic License Terms, Academic License Terms, Industry License Terms and User Content Terms to make it easier for users to understand the legal language. The commentary is intended to clarify, among other things, the ownership rights on figures created in BioRender and modifications made to our BioRender icons/templates. In short, we don’t own the work you create in BioRender - we only intend to own, and continue to own, our library icons and templates.
CHANGES TO THE NAMED FIRST/CO-FIRST AUTHOR LISTING REQUIREMENT: We have edited Section 1(e)(i)(E) of our Terms of Service and our Help Center articles so that a BioRender user on an Academic Lab/Institution plan or an Industry Team/Enterprise plan is no longer required to be listed as a named author of any publication article as long as our citation requirements are followed. If a BioRender user is on any Individual plan, the user must be listed as either the first, co-first or the last author of the article. Read more about these requirements here.
If you have any questions or concerns, open the chat messenger (on the bottom right corner) or email us at (support@biorender.com).
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Articles in this section
- CC-BY publishing and reader permissions
- Summary of licensing updates
- Publishing in closed-access resources
- Publishing in open-access resources
- Where can I use my illustrations?
- Can I use BioRender for youtube videos or on my social media?
- Do I need proof of my publication rights?
- Does every author in a journal publication require a paid license?
- Can I use my BioRender figures in a textbook? (👑 Premium Only)
- Do I need a subscription for my thesis?