Eric Steinhauer is currently head of the university library at the FernUniversität in Hagen, Germany’s only state distance-learning university. He joined the professional library service in 2001 after studying law, Catholic theology, philosophy, political science and education in Münster and Hagen. After his traineeship in Freiburg and Munich, he worked at the university libraries in Ilmenau and Magdeburg and has been working at the FernUniversität in Hagen since 2009. In 2006 he was given a doctorate in law with a thesis on doctrinal conflicts in the Catholic Church in Münster.
He teaches on library and copyright law topics at the Library Academy of Bavaria, the Bergische Universität in Wuppertal and at the Humboldt University in Berlin, where he was appointed honorary professor at the Institute for Library and Information Science in 2014. His work focuses on academic copyright law and legal issues of cultural memory institutions and academic working practices in the digital transformation, which also includes problems of data protection law. On these topics, he has been involved as an expert in several legislative processes at federal and state level.
He was a member of the working group on legal issues of the Alliance Initiative from 2008 to 2021 as a representative of the DFG. As a member of the commission for the revision of the memorandum “Safeguarding Good Scientific Practice” and the rules of procedure for dealing with scientific misconduct, he worked on the development of the Code of Conduct “Safeguarding Good Research Practice” of the German Research Foundation, heading the sub-commission “Data, Publications, Digital Transformation”.
Since May 2022, Eric Steinhauer has been a member of the “German Research Ombudsman” Committee appointed by the German Research Foundation (DFG), and he is also the Committee’s spokesperson.
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