Terms and Conditions

MetaHQ integrates curated sample and study annotations from 13 publicly-available sources. This document provides complete attribution and licensing information for each source. Users of MetaHQ must comply with the terms of all constituent licenses.

License Summary

The MetaHQ database is released under CC BY-NC 4.0 (Creative Commons Attribution-NonCommercial 4.0 International) because several source datasets carry NonCommercial restrictions.

For commercial use: You must either:

  1. Obtain permissions from sources with NonCommercial restrictions
  2. Use only annotations from sources with commercial-compatible licenses (CC0, CC BY)

Our software is released under the BSD 3-Clause.

Usage Guidelines

For Academic/Non-Commercial Use

You may freely use MetaHQ for:

  • Academic research and education
  • Non-profit organization research
  • Personal study and analysis
  • Publishing research findings (with proper attribution)

Required Attribution:

When using MetaHQ in publications or presentations, please cite:
Hicks, P. et al. MetaHQ: Harmonized, high-quality metadata annotations of public omics samples and studies. arXiv, (2026).

AND acknowledge:
"This work used annotations from MetaHQ, which integrates curated metadata from [list specific sources used]."

See Citations for citation information for all sources.

For Commercial Use

MetaHQ carries NonCommercial restrictions. For commercial applications:

Option 1 - Obtain Permissions: Contact sources with NC restrictions:

  • DiSignAtlas (Academic use only)
  • Gemma (CC BY-NC 4.0)
  • Sirota_2011 (CC BY-NC)
  • URSA (CC BY-NC 3.0)
  • URSA_HD (CC BY-NC 3.0)

Option 2 - Use Commercial-Compatible Subset: Filter to use only:

  • CC0 sources: ALE, Bgee, Gu_2023, Golightly_2018
  • CC BY sources: CellO, CREEDS, Johnson_2023, KrishnanLab
# Filter for commercial-compatible annotations
metahq retrieve tissues --terms "UBERON:0000948" \
  --license="permissive"

Quality and Provenance Tracking

MetaHQ tracks annotation source and quality:

Quality Categories (ecodes):

  • expert: Manual annotation by domain experts
  • crowd: Community-curated annotations

Contact

Please direct all questions to arjun.krishnan@cuanschutz.edu

Disclaimer

Users are responsible for verifying license compliance for their use case. Licensing terms may change; always check original sources. MetaHQ is provided "as is" without warranty.