control ©: Copyright law and freedom of communication – GFF – Gesellschaft für Freiheitsrechte e.V.

"Knowledge multiplies when it is shared. Unfortunately, scientists repeatedly encounter barriers when trying to access research results. The goal of the Open Access movement is to make scientific findings, most of which are already publicly funded, freely available to all who wish to access them. This is also in the interest of the authors, who are often forced to cede the rights to their studies to commercial scientific publishers without earning any money from the research themselves. Paywalls, which make access to scientific research results conditional on users paying a subscription fee, are an obstacle to scientific progress, and the legislator has now also recognized this.

However, the rules that are intended to enable scientists and scholars to publish their results more quickly in Open Access are often so complicated that they are still not widely used. Problems also arise when copyrighted materials are the subject of scientific research, such as in the digital humanities when researchers are unable to freely share the datasets that form the basis of their research.

This is where we want to create legal certainty in the sense of academic freedom by means of strategic legal actions, for example by helping researchers to legally enforce their rights of use under copyright exceptions...."