Permission is granted for reuse of all graphics produced by the UCSC Genome Browser website. There is no need to contact us to get permission. If your publisher, notably Elsevier, insists on getting approval, please direct them to this webpage. However, when you use the UCSC Genome Browser in your work, please cite one of our publications.
As far as the UCSC Genome Browser group is concerned, the raw table data and binary files used to create the graphics by the browser is freely available for both public and commercial use. This applies to data that is downloaded as files via http, https, ftp or rsync, and equally when data is accessed through the public MySQL server or via the web API. The only exception are the liftOver chain files, they can be linked, downloaded, used and redistributed, but only for non-commercial use -see the liftOver README. +see the liftOver README.
Sometimes, the source databases or authors place restrictions on data. In very rare cases, the genomes come with citation requirements. The README.txt file in the download directory of each assembly shows the original restrictions pertaining to the genome sequence itself by the original authors; most assemblies do not have any restrictions.
Certain genome annotation data, mostly on the human genome and in the domain of clinical genetics, have specific restrictions. For some of these, we are not allowed to make the data available. Usually the data must be obtained from the source database directly in the original format or licensed, rather from UCSC. Examples are HGMD, LOVD, OMIM, Decipher, Genomenon, Genehancer and COSMIC. For viral genomes, any GISAID-sequences or any data