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Explanatory Notes on the Authors’ Agreement

The Authors are asked to declare their consent to the Authors’ Agreement when they submit their first contribution for 1914-1918-online. The following notes explain why this is necessary and how the Authors’ Agreement should be understood.

Purpose of the contract

It is intended that the contributions submitted by the Authors for the project 1914-1918-online should be made available to as wide a public as possible. Therefore, the publication model is based on the open access principle. This requires that the contributions are made available to the public by means of an Open Content Licence, as envisaged for the project 1914-1918-online by publication under a Creative Commons Licence (hereinafter CC Licence). The purpose of the Authors’ Agreement is to distribute the rights between the Authors and the Freie Universität Berlin in such a way that enables this publication model to be followed while at the same time guaranteeing that the Authors largely retain the right to use their own contributions themselves.

Assignment of rights

In project 1914-1918-online all contributions will be placed online on a central platform by the Freie Universität Berlin. To be able to include the contributions under the CC Licence, it is necessary for the Freie Universität Berlin to have unlimited, exclusive rights of use. Such a ‘centralisation’ of the rights of use with the Freie Universität Berlin is also necessary to ensure that significant decisions on the publication as a whole can be made effectively. The Freie Universität Berlin will consult the Authors prior to any secondary publication, for example by a publishing house. In order that the Authors retain wide-ranging rights to use their own contributions, the Agreement is structured in such a way that all Authors initially assign their exclusive rights of use to the Freie Universität Berlin (Section 2 of the Agreement). In return, they receive very wide-ranging rights of use in two ways. First, under the CC Licence they have the unlimited right to copy and pass on their contributions in an unchanged form or place them online elsewhere for non-commercial purposes; and secondly, the grant-back in Section 3 (3) of the Agreement gives them the right to use their contributions in the version submitted to 1914-1918-online for commercial purposes or to allow a third party (such as a publisher) to use them commercially. For secondary publication, e.g. in publications by publishing houses, the only restriction is that it is not possible to grant the publishing house exclusive rights of use, as this would collide with the CC Licence.

Publication permission

Authors are expressly encouraged to submit materials such as photographs, graphic elements, etc., to illustrate their texts. For the project 1914-1918-online to be able to use these materials, it is necessary for the Author to provide a guarantee that he or she is able to dispose freely over the copyright and rights of use in his or her contributions. The Author must also guarantee that no third party rights are infringed upon and that neither his or her contributions nor any elements of them violate any third party rights, in particular copyright and/or personal rights. To ensure that this is the case, the Author is asked to provide a publication permission form when submitting his or her materials. This may, for example, be a form from the relevant archive holding the rights to an image. If required, the project can assist the Author in obtaining publication permission.

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