Terms of use

The website is provided as is. The specification and vocabulary are free to use, adapt and build on commercially under CC BY 4.0, as long as you credit us. We make no warranty that any of it is fit for a particular purpose, and nothing here is regulatory, legal or scientific advice.

Common Measure is a company headquartered in Washington, DC, United States. Contact details are on the contact page.

You may use this website for any lawful purpose. You may not attempt to interfere with its operation, gain unauthorized access to systems, or use automated means to place unreasonable load on it.

Ordinary crawling by search engines and AI assistants is expressly permitted and welcomed. See our robots.txt.

The Common Measure specification, the controlled vocabulary and all published validation data are licensed under Creative Commons Attribution 4.0 International (CC BY 4.0).

You may use, adapt, redistribute and build commercial products on them, including in competition with Common Measure, provided you retain attribution. Attribution should take the form set out on The Specification page.

This license will not be revoked. If Common Measure ever ceases to operate, previously published versions remain licensed under the same terms.

The Common Measure name, logo and visual identity are not covered by the open license and remain our property. You may refer to Common Measure and state that your work conforms to the specification. You may not present yourself as Common Measure, as endorsed by us, or as certified by us unless we have said so in writing.

The specification is currently a draft, version 0.1, and is in development. It is published in the open so it can be challenged before it hardens, not because it is finished. Do not rely on it for a decision with consequences without understanding its status.

This website and the materials published on it are provided as is and as available. To the fullest extent permitted by law, Common Measure disclaims all warranties, express or implied, including fitness for a particular purpose, accuracy, and non-infringement.

Nothing published by Common Measure constitutes regulatory, legal, scientific or professional advice.

In particular: environmental DNA metabarcoding is not an EPA-approved method. Conformance with the Common Measure specification does not confer regulatory approval, does not establish the legal sufficiency of any result, and does not substitute for any method approval or permitting requirement. Where an agency has an approved method or a confirmation protocol, that process governs.

To the fullest extent permitted by law, Common Measure is not liable for indirect, incidental, consequential or punitive damages arising from use of this website or the materials published on it.

We link to external sites we think are useful. We do not control them and are not responsible for their content or their privacy practices.

We may update these terms. The version and effective date above will change, and material changes will be recorded in our change record.

These terms are governed by the laws of the District of Columbia, United States, without regard to conflict of law provisions.