ICOS data license

ICOS provides high-quality and standardised data on greenhouse gases. ICOS data meets, or even sometimes exceeds, the sets the global standards for atmospheric, ecosystem flux and marine observations of greenhouse gases. All information on observations and the metadata is stored in persistent trusted long-term repositories for current and future use of the data.

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ICOS Data Licence - Summary

ICOS data is licensed under the Creative Commons Attribution 4.0 International licence (CC BY 4.0).

The summary of (and not a substitute for) the licence can be found here :https://creativecommons.org/licenses/by/4.0/legalcode

You are free to:

  • Share — copy and redistribute the material in any medium or format
  • Adapt — remix, transform, and build upon the material for any purpose, even commercially

Under the following terms:

  • Attribution — You must give appropriate credit, provide a link to the licence, and indicate if changes were made. You may do so in any reasonable manner, but not in any way that suggests the licensor endorses you or your use.
  • No additional restrictions — You may not apply legal terms or technological measures that legally restrict others from doing anything the licence permits.


The licensor cannot revoke these freedoms as long as you follow the licence terms.

How to cite ICOS data

For most of the ICOS data we will provide you with the citation to use through the landing page of the data object; from this page you will always be able to download the data object again. The Persistent Digital Identifiers (PID) or Digital Object Identifier (DOI) of the data object will always resolve to its landing page when you submit this to the handle system (https://hdl.handle.net/yourpidhandle or https://doi.org/yourdoihandle).

You may also use or link to pictures from the ICOS websites or use visualisations if you add the link to the original and the text "ICOS RI, licensed under CC4BY" followed by the link to the original.

FAIR use of ICOS data

By downloading the ICOS data product you agree to the licencing conditions that apply to the data (CC4BY). Under this license derived products and redistribution are allowed, but you are required to always inform your users of the original source of the data used, refer them to the license text and the original source at ICOS for possible updates or uploads.

Use of the data requires proper reference and citation of the ICOS data, using the exact citation (including the provided DOI or PID) as provided at the moment of upload from ICOS, if applicable.

We ask you to inform the data providers, traceable through the metadata connected to the provided DOI or PID, when the data is used for publication(s), and to offer them the possibility to comment and/or offer them co-authorship or acknowledgement in the publication when this is justified by the added value of the data for your results.

The ICOS data products are provided "as is", without warranty of any kind, express or implied, including but not limited to the warranties of merchantability, fitness for a particular purpose, title and non-infringement. In no event shall the copyright holders or anyone distributing the ICOS data products be liable for any damages or other liability, whether in contract, tort or otherwise, arising from, out of or in connection with the ICOS data products.

About Persistent Digital Identifiers

Identification of data throughout its lifecycle is essential. This can be achieved by allocating unique and PIDs or DOIs to data objects.

The PIDs allow to make unambiguous references to data during curation, cataloguing and support provenance tracking. They are also needed for correct citation (and hence attribution) of the data by end users.

In short, in today’s expanding “open data world”, PIDs are an essential tool for establishing clear links between all entities involved in or connected with any given research project.

There are a range of different types of persistent identifiers available. ICOS has chosen to primarily work with those built on the Handle system, including PIDs from the European Persistent Identifier Consortium (ePIC) and DOIs (Digital Object Identifiers) from DataCite. The ICOS community is recommended to use Open Researcher and Contributor ID system (ORCID).

Why & how to register to Data Portal

You can register to the Data Portal at the ICOS Carbon Portal Authentication Service called MyCP. We will use the information only to improve our services to you. In the future, you will access and manage the links to your stored searches and downloads and, in case of updates of the data that you downloaded, you'll be able to opt in here to receive notifications of updates.

As soon as you have accepted the ICOS data policy, your choice will be remembered, and, when signed in, you will not be bothered by ICOS license acceptance before every dataset download.