Greetings,
I am reaching out on how to reach out to authors or ResearchGate to utilize survey/questionnaires for my dissertation. How do I go about to contact the authors or receive permission for use.
Dear Meg Rudelitsch you can also check their publications and if they are the corresponding author, their email should appear in the article. So you can send them an email directly
Dear Meg,
If an instrument is published in the scientific literature, it is not always required to obtain permission to use it. Best practice is nevertheless to ask permission. And previous answers indicate how you can reach an author.
If an instrument is integral part of the publication (e.g. the full scale, questions, answers, instructions for application and interpretation) and it is published as an open access paper, then authors and publisher give more or less their permission in advance.
Or, an instrument might be found via a search machine via Internet. If the site where the instrument is published has a (sort of) creative commons license policy, or in the public domain, then again, you do not need to have permission.
On the other hand, some instruments have very strict licensing and copyright policies. In such instances that a license applies you need not only to ask permission from the owner (and the owner can be the author, but also a publisher or a private institution), but sometimes also to pay a fee. Fees can be an annual subscription, or a price per respondent.
One other advantage of asking permission is that most developers of such instrument do have an interest in others following their initial path. So besides permission, you could sometimes get free advice, support, or even involvement in joint research from which more parties can derive successful results.
Hence the variations of rules you have to deal with when applying instruments is immense. So an excellent question!
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