Is it considered "fair use" (i.e. legal) to use figures and/or images from a journal/conference publication, in educational material (possibly for a lay audience) that is monetized or monetizable, assuming proper referencing is done?
Example: suppose someone has a Youtube channel that discusses science, and wants to cover some immunology. Can they display a figure from a Nature review during their video (say for a 2 minutes in a 30 min video)? Such channels do make money (or can, at least) from advertising.
In some sense, this is similar to science journalism I suppose.
My thought is that the safest thing to do would be to ask the publisher (since I think that usually the author is not the legal holder anymore). But would that have to be done, say, for every video and every figure in each video (using the example above)?
I am not looking for formal legal advice, just whether an academic doing such a thing is uncommon, if people have some experience in such matters, whether one should feel confidently safe (or not) to do such a thing, etc...
Edit: I'm mainly interested in the USA and Canada.