Harvest Error - License Field

Harvester Guide Pages

Error Type	Page
Getting Started	What is Harvesting? | Understanding Harvest Errors
Quick Lookup	FAQ Overview | Quick Reference
Date & Time	Date Format Errors (modified, issued)
Update Frequency	accrualPeriodicity Errors
License	License Field Errors
Contact Info	Email Format Errors (contactPoint.hasEmail)
Keywords/Tags	Missing Keywords | Keyword Format
Missing Fields	Missing Required Fields (modified, keyword, description)
File Structure	Transformation Errors (ISO 19115, XML, file problems)
Other Issues	Duplicates, Sync Failures, Unrecognized Records

License field errors:free text instead of a URL

This error affects about 122 records. It occurs when the license field contains a text description instead of a web address pointing to the license document.

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What you see

$.license, 'Other (Public Domain)' does not match any of the acceptable formats

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What this means

The license field must contain a URI:a web address that points to the license document. The schema does not accept plain text descriptions, legal disclaimer text, or any value that is not a properly formatted URI.

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Common rejected values

• Other (Public Domain): a description, not a URI
• None: not a valid URI
• Long legal disclaimer text: not a valid URI
• CSS font-family strings: a data entry error, likely a copy-paste from a web form

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What the correct value looks like

For most US government datasets that are in the public domain, the correct value is:

https://creativecommons.org/publicdomain/zero/1.0/

If the dataset is released under a specific license, use that license’s official URL. For example:

• Creative Commons Attribution 4.0: https://creativecommons.org/licenses/by/4.0/
• Open Data Commons Attribution: https://opendatacommons.org/licenses/by/1-0/

If the dataset has no applicable license, remove the field or set it to null. Do not use placeholder text.

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If you can edit your metadata directly

Replace the text value with the appropriate license URI. For most federal datasets, use https://creativecommons.org/publicdomain/zero/1.0/. If you are not sure which license applies, check with your agency’s legal or open data team before selecting one.

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If you cannot edit the metadata yourself

Contact whoever manages your agency’s metadata publishing system and tell them:

“The license field on our datasets needs to contain a URI, or a web address pointing to the license, not a text description. For most of our datasets, the correct value is https://creativecommons.org/publicdomain/zero/1.0/. This is causing validation failures on harvest.data.gov.”