Which license should I choose?

During the publication process, you can easily set legally binding conditions regarding the use and further use of your publication by choosing a CC license. However, you must hold the appropriate rights to use CC licenses, so you should check if you have transferred exclusive rights to a publisher, for example. 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 her an email .

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

This graphic is provided by the e-learning working group (created by Anne Bieberstein) under the licence CC BY-SA 3.0 DE (download 2236 x 2236 px by clicking on the image). The logos used are Creative Commons.

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

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

Please adhere to the policies of the publishers or journals. For instance, some publishers only allow secondary publication or use in cumulative dissertations under an NC license. You can use Sherpa Romeo (https://v2.sherpa.ac.uk/romeo) to research publisher self-archiving policies. If the publications to be included in a cumulative dissertation are not all under the same CC license, include a note on any deviations from the CC license of the complete work. In accordance with § 17 para. 4, sentence 2, of the Promotion of Science and Research Act (PromO), provided that a reference to the publication is made in accordance with sentence 3, e.g., by means of a Digital Object Identifier (DOI).

Notes on cases where no CC license is allowed

In certain cases, the use of a CC license is prohibited. For example, this would apply if the publisher’s self-archiving policy excludes CC licenses (for eample, 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 wish to republish according to § 38, para. 4 of the Copyright and Related Rights Act (Urheberrechtsgesetz – UrhG), even though the publisher holds the exclusive rights of use (para. 4 only grants the right of public access and does not include any additional rights that may be included in CC licenses. In cases where you are self-archiving on the basis of § 38 para. 4 UrhG, and select “The copyright and license rights of the publisher and any open access rights negotiated with it apply” in all other cases, such as when a CC license is not possible due to publisher policies or other legal situations dependent on the publisher.