IOF ontologies are resources for the entire industrial community, thus must be openly available to be used by all without any constraint other than (a) acknowledgement of their origin and (b) it is not to be altered and subsequently redistributed in altered form using the original name, IRIs, or with the same identifiers.

IOF Ontologies must specify the CopyrightLicense (i.e., reuse constraints) using the annotation ‘iof: CopyrightLicense’ in any publicly released OWL version of the ontology.  It is anticipated that IOF Ontologies will be licences under CC BY 4.0 https://creativecommons.org/licenses/by/4.0/

IOF Ontologies that host terms developed by an external group (but which are not part of an existing IOF ontology) must credit the external group.

See the IOF Technical Principles guidelines on importing individual terms from external ontologies.