Cumulative dissertation

Examining the publishing contract will help here. It usually contains the relevant regulations. Many publishers allow reuse as a dissertation. Often there are also regulations about which version may be reprinted. Many publishers also offer assistance through the Copyright Clearance Center. Access the relevant article online and click the "Get rights and content" button (request permission, or similar). You should then be redirected to the Copyright Clearance Center and be able to select your request.

If you don't find what you're looking for here, you might find what our colleagues at the TU Berlin have to offer helpful.  They have collected various publishing policies on Github and make the collection available for further use.

The SherpaRomeo service is also useful for clarifying legal issues.

If a publisher does not agree to reprint your publication, it is no problem from our side if you insert the following sentence instead of the article:

For legal reasons it is not possible to print the article in the dissertation. If you are interested, you can find the article here: Author: Title of publication. Journal, volume, issue number, DOI.

(Use the usual citation method in your field).

Please note: This information is for advisory purposes, the UB does not provide legally binding information. In these cases, please contact the RPTU legal department.

For open access publications published under a Creative Commons license, the legal situation is simpler. Therefore, we recommend an open access publication. We have provided a supplementary overview of Creative Commons licenses on our website.

We recommend embedding articles in PDF form. Including articles in the form of images/screenshots interferes with the searchability of the document.

Depending on the license of the original publication, the publisher’s permission may be required. The right of citation only applies to image citations. Please note that in these cases the image material may have to be excluded from the license of the cumulative dissertation. Each image requires a reference to the license and the exclusion from the license for the entire document.

Please note: This information is for advisory purposes, the UB does not provide legally binding information. In these cases, please contact the RPTU legal department.

The University Library generally supports the use of the open access license Creative Commons Attribution (CC BY). However, it is generally discouraged to grant a free license for cumulative dissertations. In certain cases, however, it may be acceptable to grant such a license, for example if only open access publications are used.

Please use the KLUEDO “Zweitveröffentlichung” License for cumulative dissertations. If you have any questions, please contact the Open Access team at the University Library.

In general, you should indicate the sources of the articles correctly, preferably including the DOI (persistent identifier). As a rule, in the case of a second publication, publishers want the correct publisher information to be included in the document (the dissertation) as a source reference.

With cumulative dissertations, it is always helpful to indicate the individual articles incl. DOI as the source in the metadata. This increases the visibility of the individual publications.