Documents published in DuEPublico may not violate the German Copyright Act. That means that you - as an author - have either all rights of publishing, using, spreading, duplicating and public reproduction or, however, that the permission of the copyright owner must be obtained.

• Information from the project group Copyright of the UA Ruhr (German text)
• Information on copyright from Duisburg-Essen University (German text: Merkblatt Urheberrecht der Universität Duisburg-Essen)
• Rechtsfragen bei E-Learning (German text)
• i Rights info
• IUWIS (Infrastruktur Urheberrecht für Bildung und Wissenschaft) - German text

Further helpful information:

• Act on Copyright and Related Rights
• Materials on Information Law from the Institute for Information-, Telecommunication- and Media Law (ITM)
  [choose the link "Material" below "Academic Teaching"!]
• Ratgeber Multimediarecht für die Hochschulpraxis, hrsg. vom Ministerium für Schule, Wissenschaft und Forschung des Landes NRW
• Online publishing: UrhG § 38 Contributions to collections
• SHERPA/RoMEO Liste, Publisher copyright policies & self-archiving
• KB-Law. A knowledge database for copyright.
• Information about Open Access

If you yourself are the author of a document that is to be disseminated in DuEPublico (such as new essays, reviews and, with certain restrictions, dissertations and lecture notes etc.), your right as author should likewise be granted. As DuEPulico is not a publishing company, you retain the rights. Should you assign these later to a publisher for further, commercial utilisation, you will have to clarify the disposition of the DuEPublico version in the publishing contract. For dissemination in DuEPublico, we recommend that you apply a copyright notice identifying you as the author.

It would be preferable for you as author, when publishing your work at a publisher, not to grant exclusive exploitation rights to that publisher but to reserve a (digital) right of secondary exploitation to be able to disseminate the digital version in DuEPublico.

Applicable in case of contributions in compilations, i.e. periodicals:

Unless expressly excluded by your publishing contract, you yourself have the right to disseminate, on the Internet, your essays that you have published in periodicals or to publish them on a freely accessible document server such as DuEPublico, one year after the release.

Applicable in case of essays in monographs:

When using works already published, copyright protection means that in most cases a publisher, more rarely the author himself, has to consent to renewed publication on the Internet, and that this new usage frequently has to be remunerated through a copyright clearing house (VG Wort, for example). Many publishers generally allow the distribution of authors’ copies on institutional servers by means of publisher’s policies, even when rights of publication have been assigned to them. You can read up on the policies of individual publishers at SHERPA/RoMEO list.

The mere digitalisation of a work already published (be it in text, image or audio form) does not constitute a new, freely exploitable work, even if the original work had already been published before the “invention” of the WWW, and even if the creator of the work carried out the digitalisation him-/herself.

Applicable in case of essays in newspapers:

Immediately after its appearance, you may freely disseminate your essay on the Internet.

If only parts of a work (a book, a film, an essay) are used, the rule in principle is that it is necessary to obtain the exploitation rights. The copyright, however, provides exceptions for scientific work: quotations are allowed when naming the source. There are no precise regulations, however, as to how extensive these quotations may be.

Applicable in case of multimedia products:

Authors of multimedia products generally enjoy the same copyright protection as authors of pure text products. When integrating externally sourced material (photos, texts, ClipArts, graphs, tables, music, videos, animations etc.) attention must be paid at all times to the copy rights or other rights relating to those materials.

We recommend the following measures so as to avoid, where possible, any copyright infringement:

If you wish to disseminate a document that you have already published at a publishing company:

• If it is a book, then ask your publisher to make sure that you have the right to publish online.
• In case of publications in a periodical or a collected edition, you are generally given the right automatically one year after publication, unless your contract contains different provisions.

If you wish to disseminate another authors document:

• Obtain a general idea about the legal situation with the aid of Ratgeber Multimediarecht für die Hochschulpraxis published by the Ministerium für Schule, Wissenschaft und Forschung (Ministry of Schools, Science and Research) of the Federal State of North Rhine-Westfalia.
  You will find further, continually updated information, on the webpages of the German Education Server (Deutscher Bildungsserver).
• Protect your document with a password so that access is made possible only to a narrowly restricted, clearly defined circle of users.
• Maintain control over the distribution of the password so as to limit its access to university circles and guarantee exclusive use for scientific purposes only.
• Make your document available only for a certain period of time, for example the duration of a semester.
• If extracts of different works are used, do not give the sources on the index or contents page (which is still visible without a password), but on a page that is shown after the password has been entered.