Original artwork/photos. We prefer authors to upload original images/photos related to their work.
- if you have a screenshot of your app or website, use https://placeit.net/ to create an image with the screenshot on a device like a laptop, phone, with a user
- Alternatively, as TOC image we can also use a figure or a screenshot from a Multimedia Appendix (e.g. frame of a video) from the JMIR article - but only if it is a nice screenshot or photo showing people, no graphs or data plots. In that case, we assume it is created by the author and licensed under our standard license (cc-by). You do not have to add this information to the figure caption.
AI image generators. We encourage authors to get creative and experiment with AI text-to-image generation tools such as DALL-E, Stable Diffusion, Midjourney or others, to create AI-generated images conveying the main ideas of their paper. This amazing software (free of charge as of 3/2023 for limited number of images) can generate compelling images in response to a single sentence describing what the image should depict (example). We recommend to specify for DALL-E to use photorealistic or 3D style. The standard DALL-E output is a square image (1024x1024 pixels), but because we require an aspect ratio of 4:3 we recommend to resize or crop the image to 1000x750. In the TOC upload box, please provide the link to DALL-E page, describe in the caption what the original text was, and select "Public Domain/CC0" as copyright license. AI-generated images cannot be copyrighted (see Reuters article).
Examples for images created by DALL-E
Image libraries and other sources. There are many great places to find TOC images licensed under Creative Commons/Public Domain. The following are just a few suggestions:
- Wikipedia, Wikimedia Commons, e.g. through cc search
- Freepik
- Free Digital Photos e.g. http://www.freedigitalphotos.net/images/Health_And_Beauty_g66.html
- Pixabay
- A nice gallery for mobile pics especially in the developing world: Kiwanja
- Search Flickr for cc images (Creative Commons)
- Search Google for "condition creative commons" to identify photos that can be used.
In the description textbox in the JMIR form when you upload a TOC image, specify the origin of the image, and enter the license/attribution information. Images in the public domain are preferred. However, remember that "Creative Commons" is a license - there is still a copyright owner / source who must be credited in the image description, e.g. "Image Credit: (c) xy, from (URL), licensed under cc-by-nc 3.0" etc.
Order a visual abstract instead. Alternatively the TOC image can be a visual abstract instead. We offer in-house design services to create a Visual Abstract (with text) that can replace the traditional plain TOC image (no text allowed).
Do not use:
- no logos / words (exceptions for JMIR Research Protocol and JMIR Formative Research articles are possible, and for "nice" logos that are in line with the article content, but not a university logo etc)
- no wordclouds
- no overly generic stockphotos such as people sitting at a computer, a keyboard, or a stethoscope on a computer etc...
- instead of using a screenshot of a website or app, use https://placeit.net/ to create an image with the screenshot on a device like a laptop, phone, with a user
See also:
- Copyright considerations and attribution of TOC images
- What makes a good TOC image?
- What is a Visual Abstract and how to order one
Link for JMIR staff only: