The internationally recognized Creative Commons model has largely established itself in the open-access context; therefore, Creative Commons licenses can also by applied to content on Refubium.

Creative Commons licenses are used by creators to grant the public the right to use their publications in certain ways. For that purpose, the non-profit organisation "Creative Commons" has developped six standard licenses that creators can use to legally define terms and conditions for the use of their work.

The licenses are characterized by the possibility to combine different ready-made components that serve to either give permissions or make restrictions.

The four basic components that can be combined in a license are these:

The four license components can be combined in six meaningful ways, resulting in different levels of restrictiveness:

You can also use Public Domain CC0 (No Rights Reserved) you want to impose no restrictions at all.
The use of CC0 declares your publication to be in the public domain, which means that the work can be used completely freely. The author or rights holder declares that they completely waive any rights to their work.

In contrast to CC0, the Public Domain Mark (No Known Copyright) is not a declaration by which the rights holder declares their work to be in the public domain, but a label for works that are already in the public domain. This can occur, for example, after the term of protection of a work has expired. Copyrights are only granted for a certain period of time; they expire 70 years after the death of the author.

Important notes for you as licensor:

• Licensors should read and understand the terms of the selected license before they apply it.

• Once a CC license has been applied to a work / a publication, it cannot be retracted. (Licenses are irrevocable.)

• The rights management and the application of CC licenses lies completely in the author's / the creator's / the rights holder's responsibility.
• By applying a CC licenses, you will not enter into an agreement with Creative Commons, the organization, nor will you transfer any of your rights to the organization.
• Authors who have already transferred the entire rights to their work to a publisher can no longer apply a CC license at a later point in time.

Background and context

Trusted repositories are defined as either

• Certified repositories (e.g., CoreTrustSeal, nestor Seal DIN31644, ISO16363) or disciplinary and domain repositories commonly used and endorsed by the research communities. Such repositories should be recognized internationally.

• General-purpose repositories or institutional repositories that present the essential characteristics of trusted repositories.

The Refubium is not certified with a CoreTrustSeal or any of the other above-mentioned certifications. However, it does hold a DINI Certificate for Open Access Repositories and Publication Services 2019 (https://dini.de/dienste-projekte/dini-zertifikat/).
The Refubium is not a disciplinary or domain repository, but an institutional repository.

Characteristics of a trusted repository	Proof	How these are realized in Refubium
Trusted repositories display specific characteristics of organizational, technical and procedural quality such as services, mechanisms and/or provisions that are intended to secure the integrity and authenticity of their contents, thus facilitating their use and re-use in the short- and long-term. Trusted repositories have specific provisions in place and offer explicit information online about their policies, which define their services (e.g. acquisition, access, security of content, long-term sustainability of service including funding etc.).		Refubium makes use of technical measures such as digital signatures (e.g., the creation of MD5 hashes during data ingestion) and time stamps to ensure (data) integrity and authenticity as well as protection against (data) falsification. A continuously adapted online help is provided, as well as guidelines on publishing research data.
Provide broad, equitable and ideally open access to content free at the point of use, as appropriate, and respect applicable legal and ethical limitations. They assign persistent unique identifiers to contents (e.g. DOIs, handles, etc.), such that the contents (publications, data and other research outputs) are unequivocally referenced and thus citeable. They ensure that contents are accompanied by metadata sufficiently detailed and of sufficiently high quality to enable discovery, reuse and citation and contain information about provenance and licensing; metadata are machine-actionable and standardized (e.g. Dublin Core, Data Cite etc.) preferably using common non-proprietary formats and following the standards of the respective community the repository serves, where applicable.		in general, published resources (data and metadata) are openly available in accordance with the open access paradigm. In the case of sensitive data, the data may only be made accessible following approval. In the case of large volumes of data, data might not be able to be downloaded via HTTP, but via a customized data transfer solution, depending on the use case (e.g., FTP). Once activated on Refubium, every new document is assigned a DOI. DOIs are registered with DataCite by the University Library A URN is issued for published records that have been delivered to the German National Library (this is not yet the case for research data). Records include descriptive and administrative metadata, as well as licensing information (e.g., Creative Commons licenses or Refubium terms of use).
Facilitate mid-and long-term preservation of the deposited material. They have mechanisms or provisions for expert curation and quality assurance for the accuracy and integrity of datasets and metadata, as well as procedures to liaise with depositors where issues are detected. They meet generally accepted international and national criteria for security to prevent unauthorized access and release of content and have different levels of security depending on the sensitivity of the data being deposited to maintain privacy and confidentiality.		A bitstream-based long-term preservation is ensured for a minimum of ten years. Metadata are checked by the editorial team before publication/during ingestion, and procedures are in place specifying a liaison with depositors where issues are detected. Depositors require a valid university account or a valid email address. A ticket is created during the submission process. This is used for all further communication between depositor and editorial team until the data are released. Freie Universität members are qualified to publish their digital reasearch data on the server. Data release is carried out by the editors, not by the depositors. DSpace rights management is used, which can be used to specifically block access to metadata or data.

Conclusion

From the standpoint of the teams Refubium and Research Data Management researchers at Freie Universität who apply for funding in the Horizon Europe programme should be able to use the Refubium for the publication of their research data. The Refubium is not labeled as a trusted repository.

The European Commission published a pre-draft of the Annotated Model Grant Agreement (AGA) for Horizon Europe projects. According to the AGA "beneficiaries must ensure deposition of and open access to publications (and research data, where the case) through trusted repositories" (p. 155).

Repository requirements as referenced from European Commission (2021). EU Grants: AGA — Annotated Model Grant Agreement: V0.2 DRAFT– 30.11.2021. 3. EU Programmes 2021-2027. HE. Horizon Europe and Euratom. https://ec.europa.eu/info/funding-tenders/opportunities/docs/2021-2027/common/guidance/aga_en.pdf (see p. 155-156).

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This page was last edited on 02 August 2022.

For several years, Freie Universität Berlin has been committed to the idea of open access and consequently to the free accessibility of academic knowledge.

Information about open access at Freie Universität, funding models and e-publishing can be found on the Freie Universität Berlin open access webpages.

ProQuest Dissertation & Theses Database (PQDT) is a global collection of dissertations and doctoral theses considered to be an important and valuable tool for universities and researchers of all disciplines.

ProQuest supports research on all important topics and disciplines. It can be accessed worldwide at over 3000 universities. For the search the categories of common systems can be used (SciFinder, MLA, MathSciNet, PsycINFO, ERIC etc.). These services are provided free of charge.

By participating in the Master's and PhD Theses Distribution program, researchers have the opportunity to grant ProQuest a non-exclusive right to disseminate their dissertation.

Authors receive a payout that is calculated on the sale of the full text of their work, but they can also have their work removed from the database at any time.

For more information, see

https://www.proquest.com/products-services/dissertations/authors.html

Click here for the detailed contract text.

If you would like your data to be digitally published, you have to enter into a publication agreement with Freie Universität Berlin, whereby you accept the general terms and conditions governing publication on Refubium. Furthermore, you agree to your document being made available worldwide. Your rights to your work remain absolutely intact.

The text of the agreement is available here:

Publication agreement (in German)

If you are the editor of a publication series and wish to publish the series on Refubium, you can enter into an editor's agreement with us:

The text of the agreement is available here:

Editor's agreement for publication series (in German)

Please feel comfortable to turn to the Repository Editorial Team at the University Library with any and all questions.

A software licence is a legal way to distribute (or redistribute) software to users who want to use it (or redistribute it).
Software licences are required because all software is protected by copyright.

How do you use a free or open source licence for your software?

The terms open source and free software stand for the same kind of licensing model, which is model that can be pursued using licences such as the GNU General Public Licence (GPL).

What constitutes "free software" can be described very clearly. The inventors of this licensing model (i.e. the Free Software Foundation - FSF) have pointed out clear definitions of what a free software licence must fulfill.

Free software is software is only free if it

• can be used freely by anyone
• can be used freely examined and adapted to adapted to one's own needs can be freely copied, distributed and 
• can be put online 
• can be freely modified and further developed and the improvements can be made available to the may be made available to the general public

The definition implies that a free software licence gives everyone a simple right of reproduction, distribution right, the right to make works available to the public.

In the Refubium, you can use in the metadata form the following licences.

The Freie Universität Berlin University Library may make material submitted to Refubium, the Freie Universität Berlin repository, freely available on the Internet. Users may copy, print, and quote material for academic purposes and for personal use, according to German intellectual-property law.
The rights to the works lie with the authors. As far as each document's content is concerned, the authors bear all responsibility. All commercial use of documents, including that of parts and excerpts, without prior consent by, and consultation with, the author is expressly prohibited, unless explicitly permitted by the authors choice of a pertinent Creative Commons license. Attribution to authors / rights holders must be made by name.

Responsibility for compliance with legal regulations lies entirely with users; users may be held liable in the event of rights violations.

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