Other than for papers licensed under Open Access, SEG holds the copyright on all its publications.

Use of up to three figures, a brief paragraph (up to 300 words), a single table, or the abstract from a single SEG publication is considered to be fair usage, and no formal permission is needed. If formal permission is required, please make your request as indicated below ("Usage Fees"). Fees may be assessed. We expect the SEG publication to be cited with appropriate credit, i.e., fully and prominently.

To reproduce SEG materials, please check with the Copyright Clearance Center (CCC) in the USA or its equivalent in other countries. You will be charged a fee for reproduction and distribution within a classroom.

Posting on a website of material for which SEG holds copyright is in violation of copyright law. This includes posting to university archives or research websites such as ResearchGate, Academia, and Scribd, or granting permission for such websites to share a paper with members. No re-use is allowed without specific permission from SEG, with one exception: an author or group of authors may post without further permission, on their own personal or organizational website(s) the title, authors, and full abstract of their paper(s), provided the posting fully cites the SEG publication in which the material appears.

For all uses requiring written approval of the SEG, fees may be assessed, with a base fee of US$50.00. Extent and purpose of use will be considered in assessing additional fees. Fees are not waived for SEG members and must be paid prior to use of the material or the permission is void. Formal invoices will be issued only upon request. For additional information, please contact publications@segweb.org. If formal permission is required, complete and submit the Permissions Form.

Electronic use of complete SEG publications, including individual articles, is typically discouraged because it competes with SEG distribution of print and electronic matter.

The SEG Open Access policy was agreed upon in March 2014 and revised in May 2015. Authors submitting papers for publication in Economic Geology are offered the option of making their published paper Open Access, with either of two options available: a non-commercial version (the Creative Commons CC-BY-NC license) and a fully open version (Creative Commons CC-BY license, sometimes called "Gold Open Access"). The latter allows re-use for commercial purposes and may be required by the funding institution. Payment for Open Access is due before publication.

Open Access papers are published online in the usual way but are made freely available to any user and have different terms and conditions of use than other papers.

Note that all such papers will be available through the SEG member and institutional subscriber website.

Open Access papers have the OA logo next to the title of the paper in the online table of contents and on the first page of the online paper. Such papers are currently subject to the Creative Commons CC-BY-NC or CC-BY license.

SEG's Open Access papers published under the CC-BY-NC license: This license allows the freedom to distribute, remix, tweak, and build upon the work; however, the license agreement applies only to non-commercial re-use. The author must be credited by users for the original creation. SEG reserves the right to re-purpose content to sell in products such as compilations and reprints in its other publications, and to grant such permission, where it judges the use to be in line with its own copyright policy. The license is not permission for duplicate/redundant publication.

SEG's Open Access papers published under the CC-BY license: This license allows others to distribute, remix, tweak, and build upon the work, even commercially, as long as they credit the author for the original creation. The license allows maximum dissemination and use of licensed materials. The Creative Commons license is not permission for duplicate/redundant publication.

US$2,500 for SEG members and US$3,000 for non-members. Authors who select this option will need to complete a payment authorization form when their paper is accepted and they will be sent an invoice when the SEG production department is preparing the paper for publication.

There will be a section in the online submission form allowing authors to choose Open Access. The CC-BY-NC or CC-BY option can be selected on the invoice sent to the author or author’s funding agency.

The paper will go through the peer-review and production process in the same way as other papers. No preferential treatment will be offered other than free access and use of the published paper.

As SEG uses both a non-commercial option and the most liberal of the Creative Commons licenses, its Open Access policy should satisfy research-funding bodies for which Open Access publishing is required. The selection is made on the invoice.

Authors must check that any material that was not created by them that they use in their paper has full permission to publish under the selected Creative Commons license. Some libraries and other copyright holders might have policies against commercial re-use. You may use those materials in an Economic Geology CC-BY-NC licensed paper, but cannot use that material in a CC-BY paper. All material in the paper must be compliant with the license selected.