Some RPTU faculties allow so-called cumulative (publication-based) dissertations. Cumulative dissertations consist of several contributions with related content that have been published or accepted for publication in relevant scientific journals or edited volumes.
Under which conditions cumulative dissertations are permitted in a subject area is specified in the respective doctoral regulations.
If you want to publish your cumulative dissertation via KLUEDO, check the legal requirements of the individual articles.
Are you allowed to reprint published and submitted articles in your 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).
May I reprint OA publications in my dissertation?
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.
May I use illustrations from my publishing publications that I created myself again in my dissertation?
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.
Under which license may I publish my cumulative dissertation?
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.
You have to distinguish between open access publications and non-open access publications (closed access).
If your publications were published under different Creative Commons licenses, it is a good idea to use the Creative Commons Mixer. Here you will receive assistance which choice of license is possible with your "input".
In case of publications subject to a publisher's policy, you should check carefully what is possible and what the publisher's requirements are. It may be possible to select a restrictive CC license. If this is not possible, you can select the "secondary publication license" from KLUEDO.
If you wish to choose a Creative Commons license despite the publisher's policy, it is possible to exclude individual articles from the license.
In such cases, you should insert the following note before printing the article in question:
The following article is subject to "Publisher's Policy XY/ the CC License XY" and is excluded from the chosen license for the dissertation.
What else do I have to pay attention to?
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.