Figure/image permissions - clarity/warning to author and upload of supporting evidence of agreement at point of article submission

[severett89]

Is your feature request related to a problem? Please describe.

Although JW has a set of copyright and submission agreements that an author must sign up to when submitting an article, JW does not currently additionally warn authors that figure/image reproduction permissions may need to be secured as a safeguard feature. Further, there is no method for authors to upload supporting evidence of permissions, either via a PDF agreement or supporting email chain of agreement (possibly as an uploaded .eml file, for example). This leads to:

1. the editors needing to check outside of JW with the author about image and figure permissions, hoping that these have been obtained already, or that they are adequate for OA publishing.

2. the editors moving the article through to copyediting/typesetting/prepub without image permissions checked in detail because the assumption is that authors have already agreed to and obtained these, as per the submission agreement. Invariably authors either do not understand this, click through without thinking, or assume everything is OK.

This leads to potential licensing/legal issues if an article slips through review, and is accepted without an editor's due diligence far earlier in the workflow process.

Describe the solution you'd like

The above as a minimum would be helpful to make authors think twice about uploading images with an acceptable license agreement in place. But potentially of more use:

This would be extremely useful so that editors do not have to waste time post-article acceptance in wrangling image permissions that might not be viable, leading to post-acceptance withdrawal of articles in extreme cases.

Describe alternatives you've considered

The current workflow for permissions is coordinated outside of JW and has led to the acceptance of articles with insufficient image permissions, leading to article withdrawal. It may also mean the publication of articles with legal issues down the line if such permissions are inadequate and are missed by the editorial team/author.