​​​​​​Share, Use, Develop:
Standardized licenses enable the free reuse of online publications and foster innovation and knowledge transfer..

As the rights holder of a publication, you can use a license to define usage rights for third parties in accordance with your wishes. If no license is applied, usage is severely restricted under German copyright law. The dissemination of the material - for instance, by uploading it to Moodle - is prohibited.

In the spirit of openness and the reusability of materials (in line with the principles of Open Science), open content licenses and corresponding license notices are employed. The most widely used open licenses in the academic sphere are the Creative Commons licenses (CC licenses). These offer various standard license agreements that enable you, as an author, to easily grant usage rights to your works.

Through a modular system, the CC licensing model offers a total of six different license variants - ranging from the very open CC BY license to the restrictive CC BY-NC-ND license. Thus, CC licenses enable you to precisely define how your own publication may be used and reused, extending beyond the provisions of German copyright law.

How do I apply a CC license to my publication?

Select one of the six licenses and include the corresponding license text in your publication. The KIT Library has created text templates for all variants, which you can find under "Further Information." To select a license, you may use the Licence Chooser or contact the HSD BIB Publication Service.