Remuneration by VG Wort / METIS reporting system

Royalties from VG Wort

Those who publish their texts want them to be read by others. To this end, authors have granted the right of use for the publication of their contributions to the Themenportal Europäische Geschichte. However, the Themenportal Europäische Geschichte - like almost all journals in the humanities and cultural sciences - cannot pay authors any remuneration for this. However, under certain conditions, the VG Wort Verwertungsgesellschaft Wort now provides financial compensation for authors of online texts and also for those who place these texts on the internet and keep them accessible.

However, VG Wort does not pay any remuneration or fees for the publication of texts - neither in magazines nor on the internet. The purpose of collecting societies is to provide authors with financial compensation if copyrighted works are used without the author's permission, for example by making copies or saving them on data carriers. The distributions of the VG Wort thus serve to ensure a balance of interests between the public's right to information and the rights of authors. In many cases, authors receive remuneration from the collecting societies for publications in printed matter. For some years now, the VG Wort has been receiving "levies" on devices used for reproduction and also on storage media - for example, for photocopiers, scanners or DVD burners. And to enable an appropriate distribution of these levies for electronic publications, VG Wort has installed the new reporting system METIS (Texts on the Internet) installiert

Reporting system METIS: Special distribution

Until the end of 2017, the contributions on the European History thematic portal were provided with VG Wort counting pixels, which meant that only contributions with a comparatively high number of users for academic publications were taken into account in the annual distribution. From 2018 onwards, all essays on the thematic portal are therefore reportable and remunerable within the framework of the VG Wort special distribution for electronic publications.

However, METIS also has to fulfil one prerequisite. As a rule, only texts comprising at least 1,800 characters are included by VG Wort in the special distribution for remuneration.

Further information on the special distribution can be found at http://www.vgwort.de/verguetungen/auszahlungen/texte-im-internet.html