The article, “Laparoscopic and open surgery in rectal cancer patients in Germany: short and long‑term results of a large 10-year population-based cohort,” written by Valentin Schnitzbauer, Michael Gerken, Stefan Benz, Vinzenz Völkel,, Teresa Draeger, Alois Fürst, and Monika Klinkhammer-Schalke was originally published electronically on the publisher’s internet portal (currently SpringerLink) on 30 May 2019 without open access. With the author(s)’ decision to opt for Open Choice the copyright of the article changed on September 18, 2019 to © The Author(s) Year and the article is forthwith distributed under the terms of the Creative Commons Attribution 4.0 International License (http://creativecommons.org/licenses/by/4.0/), which permits use, duplication, adaptation, distribution and reproduction in any medium or format, as long as you give appropriate credit original author(s) and the source, provide a link to the Creative Commons licence and indicate if changes were made.