Terms of use & citation policy

How sequence, protein, structure, eDNA/metagenomic, imaging, and specimen data ("DSI records") made available through the African DSI DataBank may be used. This covers data use, not software licensing. Where anything here conflicts with a specific record's own access tier or license tag, that record's own metadata governs.

Access tiers

Every record carries one of three access tiers, checked before any byte is served:

public — accessible to anyone, no account needed.
regional_researcher — requires an approved access request for that specific record, which may involve a check against a third-party identity-verification service.
restricted— requires an approved access request for that specific record. Never auto-approved by an identity check alone — this platform's highest-sensitivity tier is never granted automatically.

Every granted access is logged — who accessed what, and when.

License tags

Independent of access tier, every record also carries a reuse license:

CC0 — public-domain-equivalent, no restriction on use. Applied automatically to genomes mirrored from the major international nucleotide databases, which share a joint open-data policy.
CC BY — attribution required.
Restricted— reuse terms are not open; consult the record's own metadata or the submitting institution before reusing it beyond what this platform itself grants.

Access & benefit-sharing (ABS)

This platform never adjudicates access-and-benefit-sharing or Nagoya Protocol compliance itself. It calls a third-party verification service and stores the reference/status that service returns — the compliance judgment itself is made by that external service, not by this platform. Whether a node sends data upward in the first place is a separate, node-local decision made by that node's own operators under their own institution's and country's obligations (see Governance) — this platform does not and cannot make that determination on a node's behalf.

Permitted uses

Subject to a record's own access tier and license tag, records may be used for personal, educational, and academic research; scientific, corporate, or commercial research and analysis; and internal institutional evaluation.

What this platform asks in return

Cite records you use— see "Citation policy" below.
Don't misrepresent a record's provenance or access tier when republishing derived work.
Respect infrastructure limits. Automated/bulk access is welcome (see the API guide) but should stay reasonable.
Report a security vulnerability privately — see Security — rather than exploiting or publicly disclosing it first.

Disclaimer

Data and access to the service are provided as-is. Neither the Continental Hub operator nor any node operator warrants the completeness, accuracy, or fitness for any particular purpose of any record. This platform is infrastructure connecting data to researchers — the scientific claims embedded in any given record are the responsibility of whoever submitted it.

Citation policy

Every record that reaches the Continental Hub's aggregated catalog is minted a stable, resolvable citable id at creation time, in the form AFDSI-{PREFIX}-{id} — e.g. AFDSI-SEQ-1042. The prefix identifies the record type (genome, protein, structure, eDNA classification, metagenomic profile, and so on).

This is a stable local handle, not a registered DOI— a real DOI needs a registered prefix this platform does not currently hold. A citable id is durable and resolvable today, and never changes once minted. Every record's own citation page (/cite/<citable id>) shows a real, formatted citation string, a BibTeX export, and structured metadata for discovery tools — reachable directly from a citation chip on every record listing/detail page across the site.