Terms of use

1. The data

The data are licensed under Creative Commons Attribution 4.0 International (CC BY 4.0). You may reuse them for any purpose, commercial use included. You must credit PlasticDB, cite the dataset release you used and say if you changed the data. The licence page shows how to cite.

PlasticDB records what published papers report. Records can contain errors, from the source papers or from our extraction and curation. Check important values against the cited paper. Tool results (DIAMOND and HMMER hits, signal-peptide predictions) are similarity predictions, not measurements: a hit is a candidate to test, not evidence that a sequence degrades a plastic.

2. Using the site and the API

• Automated access through the API is welcome, within its rate limits. For bulk data, use the downloads rather than crawling page by page.
• Do not try to get around authentication or rate limits, to reach other users' data, or to disrupt the service.
• You are responsible for keeping your password and API keys secret, and for activity under your account.
• We may suspend accounts or block traffic that breaks these terms or puts the service at risk.

3. Analysis tools

• Upload only data you are entitled to process. Uploaded inputs are deleted when the job finishes, and result files after 90 days (see the privacy notice).
• Signal-peptide prediction runs on PlasticDB's own servers. Only if that local predictor is unavailable may your query sequences be sent to EMBL-EBI's Phobius service instead; the privacy notice explains this and how to avoid it.
• The tools are provided for research use. They may be slow, unavailable or changed without notice.

4. Contributing data

• When you submit data, you confirm that it comes from the cited paper, as far as you know. You also confirm that you have the right to contribute it.
• You agree that accepted records are published under CC BY 4.0. You are credited on your contributor page, and each record cites its source paper.
• Curators may correct, merge or decline submissions. Published records stay available under the licence.

5. Forum and AI assistant

• Be civil in the forum and stay on topic. Do not post personal data about other people. Moderators may remove posts.
• The AI assistant can be wrong. Check its answers against the records it cites. Do not enter confidential information. Your questions are sent to DeepSeek, a third-party AI service, and DeepSeek's own terms apply to them (see the privacy notice).

6. No warranty

PlasticDB is provided "as is", without warranty of any kind. As far as the law allows, the people and institutions behind PlasticDB are not liable for losses arising from use of the site, the data or the tools.

7. Governing law

Governing law: New Zealand. Jurisdiction: New Zealand courts.