Legal (copyright and license terms)

• To preserve mutual rights and obligations, you agree to a publication agreement with the university library during the publication process.
• Before publishing your work in OPUS Siegen, please make sure that you are entitled to do so. This is guaranteed if you yourself are the author of the document and have not given exclusive rights to a third party (e.g. a publisher).
• If you have already published your work with a publisher or still want to do so, please make sure that the publisher agrees to a further publication on a document server. Many publishers allow this by now if it is a non-profit server as it is the case with OPUS Siegen. The detailed regulations in a publication or author contract are ultimately a matter of negotiation.
• By placing your work in OPUS Siegen, you transfer to the university library the right to store your document, to pass it on to the German National Library and other archival libraries, to make it publicly accessible in data networks and, if necessary, to convert it into other data formats.
• The copyright law applies without restriction to electronic documents offered in data networks. The copyrights remain with the respective author.
• Users of documents published in OPUS Siegen are explicitly obliged to comply with the prevailing legal norms. These stipulate in particular that the documents may only be copied, printed and quoted for scientific or private use. Commercial use is excluded without obtaining legal permission from the author.

Additional information on Creative Commons licenses can be found on the Open Access pages of University Library of Siegen.