Legal Compendium on Open Science: Guideline Answers Legal Questions

Practicing open science poses a variety of challenges to researchers. These include legal issues. What rights does one need to be permitted to publish documents under an open access licence? Is it legal to post preprints on the Internet? What about image rights? A new guideline provides information on important legal issues in connection with open science.

by Stefanie Porath-Walsh

The Hamburg Open Science programme has had a guideline, “Legal Issues in Open Science” (link in German language, „Rechtsfragen bei Open Science“), being prepared. Implementing open science poses major practical challenges to academic authors. In particular when it comes to licences, author contracts, data protection law or liability, there is often uncertainty. With this compendium, the Hamburg Open Science Programme aims to provide practical support for practitioners of open science and to help remove existing obstacles on the way to greater transparency in science.

Hamburg Open Science was able to win the copyright and data protection experts Dr Till Kreutzer and Henning Lahmann for the creation of the legal compendium published under the CC-BY licence. Dr. Till Kreutzer is a lawyer, jurist and publicist. He is the co-founder of iRights.Lab, the independent think tank on strategies for the digital world and co-founder and publisher of iRights.info (link in German language), an internet portal for consumers and creative professionals on copyright in the digital world. Henning Lahmann works as a Senior Researcher at the Digital Society Institute of the European School of Management and Technology Berlin, as a Senior Policy Advisor at iRights.Lab and as a research associate at iRights.Law in Berlin.

The guide is an open access publication and available free of charge in digital form as PDF, epub and mobi (link in German language). A print version is available on the programme website Hamburg Open Science or from the publishing house Hamburg University Press (link in German language).

Further information:

Till Kreutzer/Henning Lahmann; Rechtsfragen bei Open Science. Ein Leitfaden; Hamburg University Press, Hamburg 2019

Author: Stefanie Porath-Walsh is a consultant for the programme manager Hamburg Open Science at the Center for Sustainable Research Data Management at the University of Hamburg.

Share this post: