Copyright and creative commons licenses

For all documents published in electronic form via hohPublica, German copyright law applies without restriction. This means that you as the author retain all rights to your work and are free to decide on its use, distribution and modification.

To make it easier for others to use your content, you can provide your work with a Creative Commons license. Creative Commons (CC) offers various license models that allow you to specify the conditions under which your content may be reused. For example, you can decide whether your work may be used commercially or whether edits are permitted. In total, there are six different types of Creative Commons licenses, each offering different degrees of freedom and restrictions:

	CC BY (Attribution): This license allows unrestricted re-use of the content as long as the author is correctly credited. If the work is modified and shared, it must be stated that it is a modified version.
	CC BY-SA (Attribution - ShareAlike): This license also allows unrestricted reuse as long as the author is correctly credited and the derivative work is published under the same license.
	CC BY-NC (Attribution - Non-commercial): This license allows others to share and modify the work as long as proper credit is given to the author. The content may not be used for commercial purposes.
	CC BY-ND (Attribution - No Derivatives): This license does not permit editing or publication of modified content. However, commercial use is permitted. The author must be correctly named.
	CC BY-NC-SA (Attribution-NonCommercial-ShareAlike): This license allows the work to be modified as long as the author is correctly credited. The modified version must be published under the same license. Commercial use is not permitted either in the original or in a modified form.
	CC BY-NC-ND (Attribution-NonCommercial-NoDerivatives): This license allows others to share the work as long as the author is properly credited, the work is not altered and is not used commercially.

In the hohPublica form, you can define the rights for how your publication can be used by “end users” (persons, institutions, etc.). You can choose between the six CC licenses and use in accordance with German copyright law.

If the copyright license is selected, the KIM of the University of Hohenheim is only granted a simple right of use to publish the work freely accessible worldwide on the Internet. Users may then re-use the publication in accordance with German copyright law, i.e. they may not independently reproduce or redistribute the work or make any adaptations to it.

For cumulative dissertations, we recommend publishing under copyright, as the articles included are often subject to different licensing conditions of the publishers and a uniform open access license for the entire dissertation could cause legal conflicts.

If your cumulative dissertation consists exclusively of open access articles with CC licenses, you can also place the entire work under a CC license. It is important to select the most restrictive license of the articles included to ensure that the license conditions of all articles are complied with.