You can easily promote science and the dissemination of knowledge worldwide: With our support, you can publish your research papers that have already been published by a publisher in the closed-access procedure via open access. All you need to do is check your publication rights beforehand. Although many publishers allow secondary publications, these are often subject to conditions that you can read about in your publishing contract.

According to the publishing agreement

Take a look at your publishing contract: the general conditions for a second publication are often clearly laid down in a separate policy (e.g. "self-archiving policy"). Often there is no provision for a second publication of the published version, but only of the accepted manuscript. It is also customary and easy to implement a blocking period until the publication can be republished.

German Copyright Act

According to §38(4) of the Copyright Act of the Federal Republic of Germany, you as author:in have the right to make your own scientific publication freely accessible free of charge. This only requires the following basic conditions:

• Your scientific work has been produced in the context of an activity that is at least half publicly funded.
• Your publication has already been first published in a journal that appears regularly at least twice a year.
• At least twelve months have passed since the first publication.
• You publish the manuscript version (the postprint) as the second publication and not the already published publisher's version.
• You exclude commercial use for the second publication.
• You refer in the second version to the first publication with the publisher.

How we support you

We are happy to support you with secondary publications and help you navigate between copyright regulations and publishing policies. For this purpose, we offer a rights check service for publications to all scientists at TU Dresden: We clarify your publication rights and advise you on Open Access secondary publication on our institutional publication platform Qucosa.

How does the rights check work?

To check your secondary publication rights, please send us a publication list using the linked contact form:

Send publication list

Ideally, your list should be in tabular form and sortable, and include the following information: Your full name, title, journal/book title, publication date, DOI/URL, publisher. We will check the legal situation and provide you with feedback on which publications can be republished without any problems. If the legal options are unclear, we will be happy to support you in obtaining second publication rights from the publisher or rights holder.

How to publish on Qucosa

In order to publish on the Qucosa platform, we need from you

• a signed declaration of consent in German or English, which you are welcome to send to us by e-mail. Alternatively, you can simply fill in a blanket declaration of consent, which is valid (until revoked) for all publications you plan to publish on Qucosa during your time at TU Dresden.
• the files of the publications intended for secondary publication in the correct version (e.g. postprint). You can either send them to us by e-mail or register your publication for publication yourself using the entry assistant on Qucosa.
• possibly keywords and a short summary. If your publication does not include keywords or a short abstract, please send them to us. This is the only way to ensure that your work is classified correctly and can be found easily in the search.

We will gladly prepare the second publication of your work before the end of the publication embargo. In this way, you can already initiate the subsequent OA publication during the first publication - we will take care of the correct observance of the embargo period for your publication for you! Only then will the publication be released on Qucosa, so that the publisher's requirements are safely met.

Please contact us so that we can jointly determine your next steps for your secondary publication:

Caprice Lehmann Phone: +49 351 4677-402 E-mail: openaccess@slub-dresden.de

Or book an appointment with one of our experts at the Wissensbar.