Project:About

License

Data license

WikiPathways content is covered by the Creative Commons CC0 Waiver (see Creative Commons CC0 License (Q38)), which states that you are free to share (copy, distribute and transmit) and remix (adapt) the work. Our terms of use covers the ethical and social norms for attribution that we expect from research communities. For any reuse or distribution, we would appreciate that you make clear to others the CC0 terms for the work. The best way to do this is with a link to this web page. Again, this license is fairly permissive, so you shouldn't feel paralyzed by legalese if you are interested in using or redistributing our data content. Just be sure to read the terms of use and if you have any questions about fair use, don't hesitate to contact us. A detailed FAQ on CC0 can be found here, which was written by the Wikimedia community.

Why?

We came to the conclusion that this was the best licensing model after some hesitation. This hesitation stemmed from the hope that it would be possible to construct a copyleft data license, or reuse the only existing one (Open Database License (ODbL) v1.0 (Q1583)). We became convinced this was futile and thus a bad idea through reading these references: List of references on data licenses (Q2008).

For convenience, we maintain a list of related datasets and their licenses.

Software license

If not explicitly stated, no license is granted on the software hosted here. This is most likely due to omission, but possibly more strategic: we think there might be interesting options to explore with copyleft licenses. We would love to have a deeper conversation with you on those topics. Please do reach out.