To raise awareness among scientific authors in Germany of the importance of choosing the right licence for Open Access publications, the DEAL consortium is launching an information campaign.

Under the slogan "OPEN ACCESS MEANS CC BY", the consortium recommends the use of the Creative Commons licence "CC BY" whenever it is available.

The aim of the campaign is to reduce the prevalence of non-commercial licences (NC licences), which not only prevent re-use and distribution in line with the principles of Open Access, but also often allow publishers to secure exclusive commercial rights, for example to resell content to AI providers.

In collaboration with the renowned law firm iRights law, the DEAL consortium has created an information page for academic authors, which can be accessed at https://deal-konsortium.de/en/why-ccby. This resource provides background information on licensing choices for scholarly publications.

The DEAL consortium is one of the largest library consortia in the world and has negotiated national agreements with the three largest academic publishers. Around 500 academic institutions in Germany benefit from these agreements, which enable their researchers to publish with the publishers according to the Open Access model. The consortium, managed by MPDL Services gGmbH and supported by the German scientific organizations, processes around 30,000 publications per year and has ensured that the majority of German scholarly literature published in scientific journals is freely accessible worldwide.