Copyright in Research

The virtual campus can not only be used for courses but also for joint scientific research. In that case, you must comply with different copyright regulations.

Legal base for the use of digitalized works in research is § 60c UrhG.

For non-commercial scientific research it is legal to reproduce, to disseminate and to make publically available up to 15% of a published work (e.g. book), figures, single articles from the same journals or from scientific journals, other works in small extent or out-of-print works.

Text uploaded for that purpose are only allowed to be accessible for a particularly defined group of persons, and for their own scientific research. Furthermore, individual third parties can be granted access to these texts to revise the quality of the research.

For your own research you can reproduce up to 75 percent of a work but are not allowed to pass it on to third parties.

Text and data mining are standard methods in many scientific disciplines. Often, corresponding research projects were complicated or made impossible by legal restrictions.

Since March 1st, 2018, § 60d UrhG provides a legal framework for non-commercial text and data mining:

To automatically analyze a large number of works (original material) within scientific research it is permitted to

1. Automatically and systematically reproduce the original works and create a corpus from it through normalization, structuring, and categorization from the repro

2. Make the corpus accessible to a defined group of persons for joint scientific research as well as individual third parties to revise the quality of the scientific research.