CMIP6Plus: Terms of Use

To enable modeling groups and others who support CMIP6Plus to demonstrate its impact (and secure ongoing funding), you are required to cite and acknowledge those who have made the project and contributions to it possible. You also must abide by any licensing restrictions. Specifically, you must

• Adhere to licensing restrictions associated with the Creative Commons Attribution 4.0 International (CC BY 4.0) license.
• Cite, as appropriate, the MIP/project publications providing an overview and documentation of the relevant experiment design, the forcing data sets, and the supporting infrastructure.
• Cite CMIP6Plus model output used in your study as required by the CMIP Data Citation Guidelines.
• Include in publications an acknowledgment with language like: “We acknowledge the World Climate Research Programme, which, through its Working Group on Coupled Modelling, coordinated and promoted CMIP6Plus and preceding phases. We thank the climate modeling groups for producing and making available their model output, the Earth System Grid Federation (ESGF) for archiving the data and providing access, and the multiple funding agencies who support the CMIP and ESGF projects.”
• Include in publications a table listing the models and institutions that provided model output relied in the study. In this table and as appropriate in figure legends, use the CMIP6Plus officially-registered model names viewable here (model names) and institution names here (institution names).
• Register any journal articles based on CMIP6Plus results on the CMIP Publications webpage. Once a DOI has been assigned by the journal, registering a paper is easy and will make IPCC authors as well as other researchers aware of your work. More importantly it will serve to document the scientific impact of CMIP, which is of vital importance for securing future funding to support both the modeling groups and software infrastructure.
• Refer to the collection of CMIP models as the “CMIP multi-model ensemble” (or similar) and use, as appropriate, phrases like “CMIP multi-model [archive/output/results/simulations/dataset/…]” to describe contributions from CMIP6Plus and preceding phases.

The licensing agreements governing CMIP6Plus data depend on the model but generally conform to a standard template (nb.: the following is just an example and does not apply to all model output):

“CMIP6Plus model data produced by <Specific Modeling Centre Name> is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution 4.0 International License (CC BY 4.0; https://creativecommons.org/licenses/). Consult https://pcmdi.llnl.gov/CMIP6Plus/TermsOfUse for terms of use governing model output, including citation requirements and proper acknowledgment. The data producers and data providers make no warranty, either express or implied, including, but not limited to, warranties of merchantability and fitness for a particular purpose. All liabilities arising from the supply of the information (including any liability arising in negligence) are excluded to the fullest extent permitted by law.”

General Warning:

The CMIP6Plus archive contains the output of scientific simulations of the past and potential future that are subject to multiple sources of error, ranging from errors in data handling to errors in the representation of the real world in either the model or the experimental setup for which the model was used. Different parts of the CMIP6Plus archive may be subject to differing levels of such errors, and users should be alert to these issues and their potential consequences (and to the limitations of liability expressed in the data licenses).

Document version: 6.5 (21 November 2023)