Data licence and attribution

It covers the things AMSeed made: the way the database is structured, the selection and arrangement of its 516 variety records, and the descriptive text written for this site. That includes the disease write-ups, the origin notes, the source summaries, and the editorial prose on pages like this one.

AMSeed does not own its sources and does not relicense them. A university trial report, a peer-reviewed paper, an extension guide, and a seed catalog each remain the copyright of whoever published it. AMSeed links to those documents rather than reproducing them, and the 72 sources behind this database keep whatever terms their publishers set.

This is most visible on a trial page. Each of the 9 trials recorded here names the institution that ran it as the creator of that work, because authority follows whoever generated the evidence rather than whoever hosts it. The licence on that page applies to AMSeed's structured record of the trial. It does not apply to the trial, the report, or the institution's own publication, and nothing here should be read as permission to reuse those.

The individual facts themselves belong to nobody. A days-to-maturity figure, a resistance code, or a yield in bushels per acre is a fact rather than an act of authorship, and facts are not copyrightable. That is why recording them here is lawful, and it is also why this licence can be stated plainly instead of hedged: the grant is over the compilation and the writing, which are the parts that were actually authored.

Credit AMSeed and link to the page you used. A citation of the form AMSeed, amseed.com, CC BY 4.0 satisfies the licence. Where you have relied on a specific claim, citing the underlying source AMSeed names alongside it is better practice than citing AMSeed alone, because that source is the evidence and AMSeed is the index.

If you are quoting a figure that AMSeed marks as unknown, or a claim recorded at disease level where the pathogen has named races, carry that qualification with the number. The qualifications are the point of the record, and a figure repeated without them asserts more than the source did.

AMSeed is not affiliated with the American Seed Trade Association, whose website was hosted at this domain between 1996 and 2016 and now operates at betterseed.org. Nothing licensed here originates with ASTA, and this licence grants nothing on their behalf.