Currently, the application of copyright in the academic context strongly restricts the availability of some content for publications. Often, this content is indispensable for the presentation and comprehensibility of the findings building on it. The question as to which use is still covered by the right of citation almost always arises. Occasionally, it is also unclear whether a certain author has been dead for over 70 years already or whether the rights to his work have been passed on to a third party. Every author (of scientific publications) should view these regulations as a massive constraint on scientific progress, especially regarding the number of restricted works. Copyright must hence be considered a licence model ill-suited for the realm of academia.
That is why VerbaAlpina is committed to freely providing all the data generated by VerbaAlpina in accordance with the so-called FAIR-Principles and the connected concept of open access for third-party use. This places VerbaAlpina alongside a number of initiatives and institutions that are currently advocating for the implementation of this ideal (see, e.g., the Open Science Center of Ludwig-Maximilians University in Munich (LMU)). With regards to VerbaAlpina's content, it is only limited insofar as data taken from third parties with restrictive terms of use can only be shared by VerbaAlpina under the required conditions. This especially concerns some media files in the VA-module VA_MT which VA received or acquired from external data sources and that are subject to copyright. The affected objects will receive corresponding and individual markers. VerbaAlpina always endeavours to provide the terms of use for the respective contents that cannot be accessed with an open access licence. Should you find that VerbaAlpina made any errors here – especially regarding copyright infringement – we ask you to notify us immediately. The corresponding contents will be removed right away.
Any open access data and content that is usable without legal constraints will be issued under a Creative Commons licence (CC) by VerbaAlpina which only demands the denomination of the author and the same conditions for the transfer. This is reflected by the abbreviations 'BY' and 'SA' ('share alike') in CC’s nomenclature. VerbaAlpina deliberately abstains from banning commercial use (CC abbreviation 'NC' – 'non-commercial') since this may even make further use for scientific purposes impossible. The main issue is that, in individual cases, even legal experts cannot reliably determine whether commercial use is at hand or not. The fact alone that content is being used in an academic environment at a publicly funded institution is not a compelling argument against commercial use. Thomas Hartmann (FIZ Karlsruhe – Leibniz Institute for Information Structure) expressed this in his talk on open licences at the Bavarian Academy of Sciences in 2015: Hartmann 2015, minute 15:28; for a transcription of minutes 13:06 to 23:56 see the following Link):
'During everyday life at universities and even at Max Planck – who […] are 100 % publicly funded; we are constantly in partnerships, support associations and so forth and I cannot tell you "where do commercial uses start, where do they end?"'
While the 3.0 version of the CC licences were still adapted to the German legal system, this has been refrained from since the current (2018) version 4.0. The resulting consequences of this are difficult to assess for VerbaAlpina. In 2018, the portal https://open-access.net/ wrote: 'At the moment, it is still unclear what might happen when a standard licence, which the licensee does not command (for certain), is provided in a foreign language' (https://open-access.net/informationen-zu-open-access/rechtsfragen/lizenzen/, consulted on 9 October 2018, no longer available on 17 August 2022). Since the VA-Version 18_2 (December 2018), VerbaAlpina follows the practice of the LMU's university library in that we issue a BY-SA 4.0 CC licence (https://creativecommons.org/licenses/by-sa/4.0/) for all the content that does not fall under the above-mentioned exceptions. Correspondingly, all earlier versions exist under the BY-SA 3.0 CC licence (https://creativecommons.org/licenses/by-sa/3.0/de/deed.en). The software code developed by VerbaAlpina is subject to the BY-SA CC licence as well (see https://gitlab.lrz.de/verbaalpina/Verba-Alpina-Plugin/-/blob/master/LICENSE).
The licensing system as well as the access rights of the different VA user groups are presented in the image below:
Hartmann, Thomas (2015): Offene Lizenzen – ein Werkstattbericht zu den rechtlichen Herausforderungen im Jahr 2015 (Vortrag), in: Tagung "Offene Lizenzen in den Digitalen Geisteswissenschaften" (27./28. April 2015 in der Bayerischen Akademie der Wissenschaften) (Transkription von Minute 13:06 bis Minute 23:56)
