GO Usage Policy

The GO Consortium gives permission for any of its products to be used without license for any purpose under three conditions:

1. That the Gene Ontology Consortium is clearly acknowledged as the source of the product;
2. That any GO Consortium file(s) displayed publicly include the date(s) and/or version number(s) of the relevant GO file(s) (the GO is evolving and changes will occur with time);
3. That neither the content of the GO file(s) nor the logical relationships embedded within the GO file(s) be altered in any way.

This policy covers the GO ontologies, the GO database and the annotations provided by GO Consortium members. The software developed by the GO project, including the ontology editor OBO-Edit, the AmiGO web interface, and the go-dev software utilities are also freely available to the public under the terms stated above; please check the documentation provided with the software for any additional conditions.

Please address any questions about this policy to the GO helpdesk.

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Cite GO

To reference the Gene Ontology project, please cite this paper:

The Gene Ontology Consortium. Gene ontology: tool for the unification of biology. Nat. Genet.. May 2000;25(1):25-9. [abstract | full text (PDF) | read online at Nature Genetics]

GO Data

If you wish to cite data provided by the Gene Ontology project, either from AmiGO or the files downloaded from the GO website, please state the release date or version number of the data. Both annotation and ontology data may change over time, and to reproduce the results of an analysis, it is important that the same initial GO data is used. In AmiGO, the database release is at the bottom of the page.

To cite the annotations of individual database groups please see the GO publications list.

GO Consortium Tools

AmiGO

To cite AmiGO, the GO Consortium's annotation and ontology toolkit, please use the following:

Carbon S, Ireland A, Mungall CJ, Shu S, Marshall B, Lewis S, AmiGO Hub, Web Presence Working Group. AmiGO: online access to ontology and annotation data. Bioinformatics. Jan 2009;25(2):288-9. [abstract | full text]

OBO-Edit

If you reference the ontology editing tool OBO-Edit, please cite this paper:

Day-Richter J, Harris MA, Haendel M, Gene Ontology OBO-Edit Working Group, Lewis S. OBO-Edit--an ontology editor for biologists. Bioinformatics. Aug 2007;23(16):2198-200. [abstract | full text]

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GO Logo

The GO logo is available as a 50x50 thumbnail or as a 450x300 image. If you intend to use the logo on your website, please include a link to the GO home page, http://geneontology.org.

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Website Disclaimer

All information on this website is copyright © 1999–Thursday, 02-Jul-2009 20:42:00 PDT Gene Ontology Consortium. Permission to use the information contained in this database was given by the researchers and institutes who contributed or published the information. Users of the database are solely responsible for compliance with any copyright restrictions, including those applying to the author abstracts. Documents from this server are provided "AS-IS" without any warranty, expressed or implied.

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