Frequently Asked Questions

How will my institution benefit from giving others access to our data?

The ORD is an open science initiative. Your institution will be able to access the data shared by all other contributors as well. We view this sharing as no different from how we currently share data when we publish scientific articles, except the data will be available in an accessible, standardized format.

What if <institution> decides to stop participating in the initiative?

The ORD is not reliant on the participation of any individual organization. However, hosting interfaces and tools to enhance its functionality requires computational resources that will initially be donated by Google; if Google decides to stop participating and the Governing Committee believes these tools to be important to the adoption and usability of the ORD, the committee will need to seek funding for web hosting.

Will my institution have a right to use any tool developed on our data?

No. The data itself will have a share-alike clause so that derivative work must be shared under identical terms. Anyone is free to develop software tools, algorithms, trained machine learning models, etc. under a different license as long as they follow the terms for the underlying data.

Can I simply fork your repositories and create my own version of the database?

Yes! As long as you conform to the terms of the licenses.