Licensing
Last updated: 2026-08-29
plant.news publishes a machine-readable knowledge graph: plant species linked to plain-language summaries of peer-reviewed research, each summary carrying a citation to the paper it came from. Every feed file names this page in its license.terms_url field. This is that page.
The two tiers
Each feed file carries a feed.license.tier value. There are two.
evaluation
/feed/graph-eval.json. A 50-species sample, free to download, free to evaluate. Use it to work out whether the feed fits what you are building. If you show anything derived from it, credit it: "Plant research summaries via plant.news." It is not licensed for production use or for redistribution.
full
The complete graph. Licensed, not open. Terms are agreed per licensee and depend on what you are building and at what scale; email us and we will talk it through.
What we license, and what we don't
We license our layer: the plain-language summaries, the graph structure, and the species-to-research-to-topic links. We do not license the underlying literature. Research abstracts and papers remain the copyright of their publishers and authors; the feed links to each one so you can go to the source. Some plant descriptions and images come from Wikipedia and Wikimedia Commons under CC BY-SA 4.0 and carry that licence with them wherever they go. See Privacy & data sources for the full source list.
Honest limits
The summaries are written by an AI from published research. They are checked and cited, and they can still be wrong. The paper is authoritative; our summary is a way in. The feed is provided as-is, with no warranty and no uptime commitment. The schema can change — every file stamps schema_version and generated_at in its envelope so you can tell what you are holding.
Also available
A co-branded weekly digest — four to six cited research summaries a week, in your brand, ready to drop into a newsletter or blog. Same research, delivered as content rather than as data.