NTLSN · Open data
The commons is free for the sector's non-commercial use, forever. Commercial use is welcome too — it is just a conversation first, and that conversation is what sustains the free layer. This page is the plain-language summary; LICENSE is the authoritative text.
Every dataset this site publishes: the curated national events calendar, the institution directory, the rescued 1,431-work ALTC/OLT archive, the best-practice collection, and the generated feeds (events.ics, feed.xml, events-ld.json). All CORS-open, no keys, no logins.
✓ Licensed CC BY-NC-SA 4.0. For any non-commercial purpose you may use, copy, embed, remix and republish the data — with attribution to NTLSN (ntlsn.com), sharing adaptations under the same licence.
That covers, without asking: teaching and research use · a university's internal dashboards, intranets and LMS · sector bodies and networks · student projects · open scholarship of any kind · personal tools. If nobody is being charged and the data is not part of a paid product, you are inside the grant.
◈ Commercial use beyond the NC grant. If the data would sit inside something sold, subscribed to, or cost-recovered — a commercial product or API, a paid consultancy deliverable, a subscription publication, a vendor's platform feature — that use needs a commercial data licence.
That is not a wall; it is a door. Licences are priced as conversations, not tenders, and every dollar sustains the free commons.
| Layer | Licence | Why |
|---|---|---|
| library-resolvers.json | CC0 1.0 (public domain) | Dedicated in the file itself; library access patterns should never have friction |
| SoTL Index methodology · Recognition GPS crosswalk | CC BY 4.0 | Standards only work when anyone — including commercial implementers — can adopt them |
| Site code | MIT | Run it, fork it, sell services on it |
One dated note for the careful reader: data released before 10 August 2026 — including the v1.0.0 Zenodo archive — was offered under CC BY 4.0. Creative Commons grants are irrevocable, so copies obtained under that licence keep it for those versions. The NC-SA grant applies from 10 August 2026 onward.
No licence on this page — free or paid — extends to First Nations cultural and intellectual property. Traditional-country information appears on this commons as acknowledgement, not as licensable content, and NTLSN does not hold and does not assert the authority to license it, to anyone, at any price. The full statement, written to be corrected.
For any use, this line (or its equivalent) does the job:
Data: NTLSN (ntlsn.com), CC BY-NC-SA 4.0 · Dianati, S. (2026). NTLSN. Zenodo. https://doi.org/10.5281/zenodo.21815413
Not sure which side of the line your use falls on? Ask — a person reads it, and "actually, that's fine, it's non-commercial" is a common and happy answer.