Our genetic data are now officially in the public domain

We’ve finally found the time to formally set up copyright for Genomes Unzipped. As you can see at the bottom of this post, most content on the Genomes Unzipped website is now available under a Creative Commons Attribution-ShareAlike 3.0 Unported License, meaning that it can be reused so long as proper attribution is given, and that the resulting product is distributed under the same or similar license. We’ve made an exception in one special case: all of our raw genetic data are now available under the Creative Commons CC0 public domain option. That means we waive copyright to our genetic information, so it can be used for any purpose without restriction or attribution.

One of our goals in this project is to encourage people to develop novel tools for mining information from genetic data, using our data as a testing ground. Adding the CC0 license makes it explicit that our data are intended to be a community resource: if you want to use them to test your new analysis tool, or to see how much data you can expect to get from a genetic test, or even to make an artwork, feel free.

Finally, a teaser: the pool of genetic data available from the group is set to expand over the next few weeks. Stay tuned…

Genomes Unzipped content is available for reuse under a Creative Commons Attribution-ShareAlike 3.0 Unported License.