Requests for Permission to Redistribute ICPSR Data

ICPSR encourages data reuse and strongly encourages sharing links to ICPSR study home pages using the persistent identifier (DOI) found in the study citation. This has the advantage that potential users will receive the most up-to-date version of the data and documentation, accessible in all popular data formats (e.g., Stata, SPSS, SAS, TSV, R, ASCII).

Requests for permission to redistribute ICPSR data (rather than simply links to study homepages) must first be approved by the ICPSR Data Stewardship Policy Committee (contact email: icpsr-help@umich.edu).

ICPSR obtains permission from data depositors to disseminate their data collections under its standard terms of use. These terms include the following statement, from Article 1.2.B of the Bylaws, as agreed to by each campus Official Representative upon their institution's becoming a member of ICPSR:

Members will not distribute data or other materials supplied by ICPSR to other members, organizations, or individuals at other institutions, without the written agreement of ICPSR.

Providing ICPSR data to any large language model (LLM) which retains data, or uses provided data for training (e.g., ChatGPT, Microsoft Copilot, Google Gemini, etc.), is redistribution of ICPSR data and is barred by our terms of use. Using an LLM with more restrictive terms may be permissible, but contact ICPSR beforehand for permission.

This policy also applies to data and documentation materials supplied to institutions and organizations that are not members of ICPSR.

The versions ICPSR distributes reflect significant labor and added value to ensure reusable, findable data that are preserved and accessible into the future. For data deposited by individual investigators, these curation costs are borne by the ICPSR membership, and thus, these studies are available to members only and cannot be redistributed.

Evaluation of the request will consider the following:

• Is the product to be created from the ICPSR data of general benefit to the research community?
• Does the proposed product offer functionality not available from ICPSR?
• Will the product provide a clear net benefit to the ICPSR membership?
• Will the license agreement for the product be acceptable to the ICPSR membership?
• Will the proposed remuneration to ICPSR be satisfactory? Remuneration may be either monetary or in the form of access to the product.
• Is this a subset of the data in support of increased transparency and replication of findings?

Approved requests may be asked to pay a fee to enable co-distribution of the processed version of the data and documentation. The fee covers the cost of data processing paid initially by the membership. This option allows the requesting institution and ICPSR to distribute the data freely to anyone. ICPSR will need to receive authorization for this action from the principal investigator or the principal investigator's university.

Note: This policy does not apply to data archived through openICPSR.