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The PROSITE database of protein domains, families and functional sites License conditions Since September 1998

PROSITE is a database of protein families and domains developed by the groups of Amos Bairoch at the Swiss Institute of Bioinformatics (SIB). It currently contains signatures specific for about 1500 protein families or domains. These signatures are either sequence patterns (also called regular expressions) or profiles (also called weight matrices). Each of these signatures comes with documentation providing background information on the structures and functions of the relevant proteins. PROSITE also includes a set of rules (ProRule) which are used to give extra meaningful information when a match with a PROSITE profile or pattern is detected.

Increased data flow and especially the automation of proteome analysis have created a requirement for resources, which cannot be addressed in full by public funding. In 1998, it has therefore been decided to ask non-academic users to financially contribute to the maintenance of the database. This is achieved in the following manner:

• Commercial users are asked to pay a yearly license fee.
• No license fee is charged to academic users, nor is any restrictions be imposed on their non-commercial use or reuse of the data.
• The funds raised are used to enhance PROSITE both in scope and quality.
• All releases of PROSITE (since release number 15.0) are copyright.
• Academic or commercial users can access PROSITE in the same way, but commercial users need their company to pay a license fee irrespective of the method by which they access the database.
• Use of PROSITE for educational and training purposes (where this is the sole reason for the use of the service) is not subject to any license agreement.
• Reference to or printing of the documentation part of PROSITE entries (within reason) remains allowed in publications.

Starting in September 1998, a system of an annual subscription fee for commercial use of the database has been implemented. SIB has mandated Geneva Bioinformatics (GeneBio) SA to act as its representative for the purpose of concluding the necessary license agreements and levying the fees.

If after having read this document, you still have questions, you can send an email to the following addresses:

General information:
Licensing information: license@isb-sib.ch

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