GO Usage Policy

The GO database and vocabularies are freely available to the public. The annotations provided by member organizations in the Current Annotations table are also available to the public. 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 version number(s) and/or date(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.

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. Nature Genet. (2000) 25: 25-29. [download in PDF format]

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

If you reference the ontology editing tool OBO-Edit [external website], 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. (2007) 23(16): 2198-200. [full text [external website] | abstract [external website]]

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GO Logo

If you would like to include our logo in a web site, you can paste this text directly into the html of your site:

<a href="http:/www.geneontology.org/">
<img width="54" height="50" alt="GO logo"
src="http://www.geneontology.org/images/GOthumbnail.gif"
title="Gene Ontology website"></a>

The resulting image will send the user to our home page if it is clicked, and the icon will look like this:

If you require a logo large enough to use on a poster you can download this 48KB image.

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Website Disclaimer

All information on this website is copyright © 1999- Wednesday, 20-Aug-2008 00:33:11 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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