Licensing

How data, code and documentation are licensed here.

Data

Licensed per record, never blank, set at deposition. The licence is shown on every record page and included in every machine-readable representation. A record whose licence could not be established says unverified there and is not published — see Records held pending licence verification, below. No record is in that state today.

The default for new deposits is CC BY 4.0: use it, adapt it, redistribute it, including commercially, with credit. The citation block on the record page is the credit we ask for.

Other licences are accepted where a depositor's institution or funder requires them. That is why the licence lives on the record rather than in a single site-wide statement: a blanket claim would either exclude those deposits or misrepresent them.

Accepted at deposit:

CC0 is a defensible choice for purely factual metadata and is available. CC BY is the default because one licence is simpler to administer than several, and at this team size that is worth more than the theoretical gain.

Records held pending licence verification

The rule above governs what is deposited here. Records loaded from an outside source are governed by that source's terms, and where those terms cannot be established, the record is not published.

The net collection was loaded from two sources with full provenance, and all 3077 of its records are served — under two different licences, because the two sources belong to different people.

The records that came from MOF+: CC BY 4.0. MOF+ is this group's own service, so nets retrieved from it are the project's own data to license, and the project licenses its data CC BY 4.0. That is our own decision, not a grant discovered in the source data, and each of those 2443 records' licence_source says so in those words rather than implying somebody else granted us anything.

The records that came only from the RCSR Systre archive: RCSR-2019. rcsr.anu.edu.au is a third party and the archive file states no terms, so those 634 records were held — unlisted, 403 at their own URIs — until 2026-09-09, when the terms were confirmed: the nets are © 2019 RCSR.net, and MOF++ redistributes them under a private agreement with the rights holder. That is why RCSR-2019 is deliberately not a Creative Commons identifier. It carries open: false, and those record pages print "Not an open licence": the agreement permits redistribution by MOF++ and grants you no onward licence. To redistribute these nets yourself, go to RCSR.

The hold remains the rule for anything else. A record whose terms cannot be established is neither hidden nor deleted: it stays out of listings, and its URI resolves with HTTP 403 and a page stating that the record exists, what is withheld and why — including the provenance sentences that would otherwise spell a withheld value out in words. The identifier is permanent and resolves to the full record once a licence is established. Nothing is licensed by default and no licence is inferred: assigning one we have not verified would misrepresent somebody else's terms, which is the one failure this scheme exists to prevent.

The client-side behaviour is documented in the API reference; the provenance recorded on each record, held or published, is described in The two orderings a net carries.

Code

MIT, matching the client tooling.

The previous codebase shipped the web2py welcome application's public-domain boilerplate as its licence file — a file that says so in its own text. It was not carried forward, because it was never a decision anyone made.

Documentation

The pages under Learn and these site pages are part of the source repository and are covered by the same MIT licence as the code. Reuse them, including as the basis for your own group's documentation.

Citing

Cite the versioned dataset release together with the record URI. DOIs are minted per release, not per record — why. CITATION.cff in the repository carries the software citation.