Free forever
In short: everything needed to read and check a result stays free, permanently. At launch, it requires an email-verified account.
The specification, the vocabulary, the identifier lookup and every piece of validation data are free permanently, for every user, under a license we cannot revoke.
Free to read. Free to check. Free to implement. Free to compete with us.
01 · THE FOUR FREEDOMS
What free actually means here
- 01
Free to read
The full specification, the controlled vocabulary and every published version are available free and without a paywall (at launch, with an email-verified account). No gated PDF, no "contact us for the full document."
- 02
Free to check
All validation data is published, including results that do not flatter us. Committee proceedings and minutes are public. Every proposal we receive is logged with its outcome, including the ones we decline and why.
- 03
Free to implement
You may build your own implementation of the specification, in any language, for any purpose, without telling us. You do not need a license, a partnership, or our permission. Attribution is the only requirement.
- 04
Free to compete with us
This is the one that matters. You may build a commercial product on this specification and sell it against us. We will not revoke the license, and we could not if we wanted to — CC BY 4.0 is irrevocable by design.
02 · THE FINE PRINT
What is not free
Being straightforward about this is part of the point. Common Measure is a company and it charges for services. Here is the line, stated as plainly as we can:
The specification is free. Having us run your data through it is not.
Free, permanently
- The specification, all versions
- The controlled vocabulary
- SPIN lookup.
- All validation and ring-test data, once published
- Committee proceedings, minutes and decisions
- The JSON Schema and the validator
- The right to implement it yourself, commercially
Paid services
- Sequence-data processing, around $40 per sample
- The client workspace, around $400 per seat per month
- The signed assurance record
- Dedicated US-hosted instances
- A signed assurance record of how each result was produced
Anyone can check our work without paying us.
03 · WHY
Why give away the thing you built
Because a specification you have to pay to read is one somebody else will copy for free, and then theirs becomes the shared reference instead. Openness here is not generosity. It is the only version of this that survives contact with reality.
There is a second reason, and it is the more important one. A specification that can be withdrawn is not open infrastructure — it is a product with a lock-in risk attached. If a state agency is going to write a reference frame into a monitoring program that runs for thirty years, it needs to know the frame will still be there in year thirty regardless of what happens to us.
So we removed our own ability to take it back. That is a constraint on Common Measure, not a favor to anyone.
04 · THE GUARANTEE
What makes this more than a promise
The license is irrevocable.
CC BY 4.0 cannot be withdrawn once granted. Every version we publish stays licensed under it permanently.
It survives the company.
If Common Measure ceases to operate, everything already published remains free and usable under the same terms. Nothing reverts.
Changing it requires a vote we do not hold.
The commitment is written into how the company is governed. Altering it needs approval from a science committee on which Common Measure has no vote.
Superseded versions stay published.
We do not remove old versions when new ones supersede them. Anything you built against remains available at a stable URL.
The lookup has no rate limit.
Resolving an identifier is free (at launch, with an email-verified account). There is no API fee and no usage tier above which it becomes paid. If we ever introduce one, the specification stops being free in any meaningful sense, and we will have broken the commitment rather than refined it.
05 · USE IT
Start here
Read the specification
Scope, boundaries, versioning and the assurance record field list.
The SpecificationRead the vocabulary
Fifty-nine defined terms, versioned, open to challenge.
Terms & DefinitionsCite or implement it
License terms, citation form, and how to propose a change.
How to take partTake it and build something
If you implement this specification independently, we would like to know — not because you owe us anything, but because independent implementations are the best evidence a specification is implementable. Tell us and we will list yours.
Tell us what you built