Licenses

Individual datasets come with their own licenses. Almost all data providers use a creative commons license such as CC BY 4.0, or the similar French ETALAB license. These generally allow the use and redistribution of data for any purpose; but, for a few datasets, commercial use may still be restricted.

The main exception to this rule is data from CIMMYT. CIMMYT is perhaps the largest provider of open agricultural research data, but their data come with a bespoke “CIMMYT license” described here. For the official license(s) see the CIMMYT dataverse.

You can check the license for specific datasets in the on-line “reports”, and in the “metadata” files. For example, even with CC-licenses, you may need to check whether some data sets prohibit commercial use (check for “-NC”). Please do not use data that has a license that prohibits your use.