[TallGuyShort]

Shout out to NASA and whoever did this, as they've always had a much clearer mandate to make things public domain. On their website they explicitly state that images, models, etc. are not copyrighted unless they were copyrighted by someone else and used with permission.

[cowsandmilk]

That isn't a NASA policy, that is the law about works by government employees.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Copyright_status_of_work_by_th...

This is actually reflected in the copyright agreements at every major journal. See, for instance, Form B at the ACS journals.

http://pubs.acs.org/page/copyright/journals/index.html

The difference is in whom the employer is. If you are employed by a university doing work on a government grant, you are not a federal employee, so the work is copyrighted.

[TallGuyShort]

I suspected the all-government-employees thing but wasn't aware of the journal copyright aspect. Thanks for clarifying with sources!

[tombert]

Is that true?! I think I might have a few new desktop backgrounds coming up...

It totally makes sense. I kind of thought the whole point of public research was so that everyone could benefit.

[TallGuyShort]

http://www.nasa.gov/multimedia/guidelines/index.html

There are some restrictions but they're all very sensible, like forbidding the use of official logos to imply endorsement, etc.