Data licensing

Our contribution

We place no restrictions of our own on the index files hosted in the genome-idx bucket. You may use them, and results produced with them, for any purpose, including commercial purposes.

The MIT license at the top of the GitHub repository covers the code and documentation in that repository. It does not describe the terms of the data the indexes are built from.

Terms of the underlying data

Each index is built from sequences, and often a taxonomy, published by a third party. Those inputs keep their original terms, and the terms of an index follow from them. The per-index pages name the sources, and many indexes ship a library_report.tsv file listing the origin of every sequence.

Source	Used by	Terms
NCBI (RefSeq, GenBank, UniVec, NCBI Taxonomy)	Kraken 2 Refseq collections (Viral, MinusB, Standard, PlusPF, PlusPFP and their capped versions), core_nt, and most other indexes	NCBI places no restrictions on the use or distribution of its data, but notes that some submitters may claim patent, copyright or other intellectual property rights in the sequences they submitted. See NCBI’s policies and disclaimers.
GTDB	Kraken 2 GTDB indexes	CC BY-SA 4.0 (see GTDB licenses). Commercial use is allowed. Because these indexes are derived from GTDB genomes and taxonomy, we distribute them under CC BY-SA 4.0 as well: credit GTDB, and redistribute adapted versions under the same license.
SILVA	Indexes built from SILVA releases	CC BY 4.0 (see SILVA license information). Commercial use is allowed with credit to SILVA. SILVA notes that commercial users may have benefit-sharing obligations under the Convention on Biological Diversity.

For indexes built from other sources, such as EuPathDB or human pangenome assemblies, consult the terms published by that source.

This page summarizes the terms as we understand them and is not legal advice. If you need a definitive statement for a license register, check the source terms directly.

Questions can go to the issue tracker.