How to make your records more accessible
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We like to think that our wildlife records can be used by ecologists, planners, conservationists and many other organisations, but this isn’t always automatically the case. Fortunately, there’s an easy way to make sure your iNaturalist Records have an even bigger impact; and it’s as simple as changing a setting to make sure your wildlife records can be shared with those who need it.
The default licencing setting for your data on iNaturalist is “CC-BY-NC”. This means your record can be shared with researchers, but excludes access and use by many commercial organisations. This setting can prevent records being used by some wildlife recording schemes and local environmental records centres too. So, we highly recommend changing your iNaturalist settings to to an open licence such as “CC0” or “CC-BY”, which will enable your records to be used as widely as possible.
How to change your observation licence so that it can be freely used
On Andriod phones: Open the iNaturalist App: Go to Settings > Default Licenses > choose CC0 or CC-BY for “Default observation licence”
For website users: Log onto iNaturalistUK Go to Account Settings > Content and Display > Licensing > Choose CC0 No Copywrite or CC-BY “Attribution” for “observation license”
For iPhone users: Go to the desktop website for iNaturalistUK and follow the instructions for website users
What do the different licences mean?
There are 8 licencing options available when you open the "licencing" option on your settings. The top 2 (CC0 and CC-BY) are of most use outside of iNaturalist:
CC0 = No Copyright - This means you're happy for anyone to use these observations/photos/sounds for any purpose, and they can use them without crediting you as the owner. Other people can also create new material based on your work.
CC-BY = Attribution - This means anyone can use your observations/photos/sounds as long as they credit you as the owner. Others can create new material based on your work.
CC-BY-NC (default when signing up to iNaturalist) = Attribution, Non Commercial - This means anyone can use your observations/photos/sounds as long as they credit you as the owner. They cannot use your observations/photos/sounds in a commerical way (i.e. to make profit). This setting can prevent records being used by some wildlife recording schemes and local environmental records centres.
You can also can set your photo, sound and observations to have different licences. For example, if you're a professional photographer and you're happy for anyone to use your observation record but you want to protect your photos from being used commerically, you can set your Observation to CC-BY, and your Photos to CC-BY-NC.
It takes only a few seconds to make this change. You can find out more about what the various licencing options mean on this page: https://uk.inaturalist.org/blog/58298-licensed-to-share or find out more about what happens to biodiversity data here
Thank you for making your records of wildlife go even further and have even more positive impact!
