§ 60a UrhG regulates the provision of materials for teaching and learning. The provision of up to 15% of a work, individual articles and essays from specialist journals, works of limited scope and the complete provision of out-of-print books is permitted, provided that accessibility is restricted to the circle of participants in the course. This regulation therefore does not apply to OER or other freely available teaching materials.

Please also note the information on alternate materials.

§ 60c (1) UrhG stipulates that up to 15% of a work may be reproduced, distributed and made publicly accessible for the purpose of non-commercial scientific research. This applies to a clearly defined group of persons, for their own scientific research and for individual third parties, insofar as this serves to verify the quality of scientific research.

According to § 60c (2), 75% of a work may be reproduced for the author's own scientific research. In contrast to para. 1, these may not be shared with other researchers. Illustrations, individual articles from the same specialist journal or scientific journal, other small-scale works and out-of-print works may be used in their entirety in deviation from paragraphs 1 and 2, i.e. they may also be shared within a defined circle of non-commercial researchers.

For the purpose of scientific research, reproductions for text and data mining are also permitted without the consent of the rights holder under certain conditions. This is regulated in § 60d UrhG, with reference to the legal definition of text and data mining in Section 44b (1) UrhG.

One of the requirements is that it must be scientific research, the actors of which act non-commercially. Under these conditions and the condition that it is text and data mining in accordance with § 44b (1) UrhG, works may be reproduced, a corpus created, evaluated and made available for joint scientific research and peer review. However, once the research work has been completed and reviewed, all copies and the original material must be deleted. There are different interpretations as to when the copies (but not the original material) should be deleted. For example, according to the information page of the NFDI4Culture or the commentary on copyright law by Dreier/Schulze, expected follow-up research or the recommendations of good scientific practice can also be taken into account under certain conditions.

Incidentally, § 60d UrhG may not be applied to computer programs.