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Licensing and attribution

Updated April 2, 2026

Permitted licences, attribution requirements, and DOI policy for Hub datasets.

The Hub only publishes data that can be legally redistributed and reused. This page sets out what licences are accepted and how attribution works.

Permitted licences

  • CC-BY-4.0 — preferred for new contributions
  • CC-BY-SA-4.0 — accepted; note the share-alike obligation propagates
  • CC0 / Public Domain — accepted
  • Custom or non-commercial licences are not accepted; talk to the maintainers if your source data is restricted.

The licence in the metadata record is an SPDX identifier and applies to the distributions listed in the record, not to third-party source data, which retains its own terms.

Attribution

Reusers must cite the dataset as given in the record’s citation block. Every dataset page renders a copy-ready citation. When a dataset is derived from an external source (for example FAO or IFPRI data), the original providers stay listed as licensor/producer contacts and must be credited alongside the Hub.

DOIs

Datasets processed and published by the Hub get a DOI minted on publication. Datasets that already carry a DOI from their original publisher (for example Harvard Dataverse deposits) keep it — the record’s doi field always points at the citable identifier.