"It is our policy not to include attributions of figures and tables" - what does this mean? I just received some proofs of an accepted paper, for me to review prior to publication. The email from the publication staff included the following paragraph:


  It is our policy not to include attributions of figures and tables. If you feel that such citation is necessary in the case of your article, please indicate so when sending your page proof comments and corrections back to us.


(no other relevant context.)

Does anybody know what kind of attribution they are referring to here? I have a hard time imagining some kind of attribution that would ordinarily be appropriate, but could be removed as a matter of policy (ethically).

I'm not going to ask the staff member who sent me the email, because it doesn't apply to my paper anyway. I'm just wondering if anybody here knows.
While I have not encountered this before, my guess is that the journal has decided to discriminate against non-academic citation (e.g., crediting of image sources per Creative Commons licenses).  

While I believe that this is improper and unethical, I have encountered worse.  I have, in fact, encountered a major journal that refused to allow citation of anything that was not a journal article, because that journal's field does not typically have peer-reviewed conferences.  To somebody coming in from computer science like myself, this is clearly incorrect and unethical: the editors of the journal, on the other hand, saw themselves as manning the barricades in defense of scientific quality and refusing to allow inadequately peer-reviewed material to infiltrate their publication.

In short: I think this is another case of "academia varies more than people think it does," in this case unfortunately being baked into a journal's policy, and would recommend anyone encountering such a policy to simply make their case as suggested by the policy.