Which license should I choose?

By choosing a CC licence during the publication process, you can easily set legally binding conditions regarding the use and further use of your publication. You must hold the appropriate rights for the usage of CC licences, so you have to check if you have transferred exclusive rights e. g. to a publisher. If you need legal advice, you may contact our in-house counsel Petra Heermann during her office hours at +49 (0)9131-85-29394 or send an e-mail to Petra.Heermann@fau.de .

For license selection, you can use the Creative Commons License Chooser (https://creativecommons.org/choose/?lang=en) or the following overview as a guide:

Please note that with regard to non-commercial use, your choice may restrict the visibility of your document, since this provisions affects search engine providers and resource discovery systems. For further information on the individual licences, please visit https://creativecommons.org/licenses/?lang=en

Notes on CC licenses in the context of secondary publications or cumulative dissertations:

Please follow the policies of the publishers or journals. For example, some publishers allow secondary publication or use in cumulative dissertations only under an NC license. You can use Sherpa Romeo (https://v2.sherpa.ac.uk/romeo) as a tool for researching publisher self-archiving policies. If, in the case of cumulative dissertations, the publications to be included are not all under the same CC license, please put a note on corresponding deviations from the CC license of the complete work. Problematic (e.g., legally defective) individual contributions can also be omitted from cumulative dissertations in accordance with § 17 para. 4 sentence 2 RPromO, provided that a reference to the publication is made in accordance with sentence 3, e.g., by means of DOI.

Notes on cases where no CC license is allowed:

In certain cases, the use of a CC license is not allowed. Examples of this would be if the self-archiving policy of the publisher excludes CC licenses (e.g. for some Nature subscription journals: “Please note that the accepted manuscript may not be released under a Creative Commons license”) or if you have published with a German publisher and want to secondary publish according to § 38 para. 4 Act on Copyright and Related Rights (Urheberrechtsgesetz – UrhG) although the exclusive rights of use are held by the publisher (para. 4 only grants the right of public access, no other rights that may be additionally included in CC licenses). Please select the document license “The publication contract and German copyright law apply” in cases where you are self-archiving on the basis of § 38 para. 4 UrhG and “The copyright and license rights of the publisher and any open access rights negotiated with it apply” in all other cases where, for example, no CC license is possible due to the publisher’s policies or other publisher-dependent or negotiated legal situations.