Licence & citation

Data licence: CC BY 4.0

The PlasticDB data are licensed under the Creative Commons Attribution 4.0 International licence (CC BY 4.0). This covers the records on this website and in the API, the downloads, and the weekly dataset releases. (SPDX identifier: CC-BY-4.0.)

This means you may:

  • share the data: copy and redistribute it in any medium or format;
  • adapt it: remix, transform and build on it;
  • do both for any purpose, commercial use included.

You must:

  • give credit: cite PlasticDB as shown below, and name the dataset release you used;
  • link to the licence: https://creativecommons.org/licenses/by/4.0/;
  • say if you changed the data, for example by filtering, merging or re-annotating it.

This summary is not a substitute for the licence. The legal code is the binding text.

How to cite

Cite the PlasticDB paper:

Gambarini V, Pantos O, Kingsbury JM, Weaver L, Handley KM, Lear G (2022). PlasticDB: a database of microorganisms and proteins linked to plastic biodegradation. Database, 2022:baac008. https://doi.org/10.1093/database/baac008

Also name the dataset release you searched or downloaded. Records are published in weekly releases, so the release pins what you saw:

PlasticDB dataset release 2026.39.12 (the release this site is serving now)

Every release is listed on the Downloads page. GET /api/v1/releases/current returns the current release, a ready-made citation string and this licence.

Contributed data

Records contributed through Submit Data are published under the same CC BY 4.0 licence. Contributors are asked to agree to this before they submit. Contributions are credited on the contributor's contributor page, and every record cites the paper it came from.

What the licence does not cover

  • The source papers. PlasticDB records facts reported in published papers and links to them. The papers themselves stay under their publishers' terms.
  • Third-party data we link to or display, such as UniProt, NCBI, AlphaFold/EBI and RCSB PDB structures. These keep their own licences.
  • The website's source code is licensed separately, under the MIT licence in the code repository's LICENSE file.

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