Intended Usage, License, and Citations

The data in the X-ray Absorption Data Library have been licensed under the Creative Commons Zero license and put in the Public Domain. This allows anyone to use these data for any purpose, without restrictions. All claims of exclusive copyright on these data have been relinquished in order to ensure that the broad community of scientists, educators, and students can use these data in their studies using X-ray absorption spectroscopy.

The people submitting data to this library agree to these terms to permit free and unrestricted access to this data.  While exclusive ownership has been relinquished, each spectrum here will have the name of at least one real person associated with it. This will typically be the person who uploaded the data, or someone involved in the collection of the data.  This attribution follows standard academic practices and allows the people who upload spectra to be recognized by their peers for their contribution. It also allows people to look at spectra to see who uploaded the data.

Most of the data here will have been collected at government-operated national laboratories and/or with government-funded research grants that may have policies about data sharing and attribution. These policies are generally liberal and designed to promote public access to data, at least after some time.  By uploading the data here, the submitter has agreed that submitting the data with this license follows the guidelines of the institutions and funding agents.

If some of the data here becomes an important part of your work, you may want to contact the author or their institution or refer to there work.  Some spectra will have a literature citation associated with them. You are not obliged to cite such work in order to use the data, but we encourage you to do so if those data become an important part of your work.

At this point, if you wish to cite the collection as a whole, simply use the URL https://xaslib.xrayabsorption.org and reference the work as belonging to the International X-ray Absorption Society. We will explore generating a DOI for the collection as a whole.

On Data and Sample Quality

The XAS data here are intended to be of good quality and collected using well-characterized samples that are of general interest. The spectra are intended to be able to act as standards for more complex analysis and to give experimentalists a set of benchmarks for data quality and instrument calibration. As with any experimental method, there may be imperfections or inadvertent errors in any of the individual spectra here. While we intend these to be “good spectra”, there are no guarantees are made about the quality of the data or the origin or quality of the samples used. Use these data with caution. Also see the information on Ratings and Reviews, which allows anyone interested to add ratings and comments on a particular spectrum or suite of spectra.

To better explain and curate the data, information is included about the beamlines and facilities (typically government-funded laboratories) where the data were collected, and at least one person involved with the measurement. These should not be viewed as an endorsement of the data by the facility or as a notice of copyright to restrict who can use the data.