IHME Free-of-Charge Non-Commercial User Agreement

It is a custom, registration-gated license rather than an open one. Three cataloged resources ship under it: the IHME GBD Results Tool Tobacco/Smoking Query Interface, the GHDx record for GBD 2019 Smoking Tobacco Use Prevalence 1990-2019, and HealthData.org's Tobacco Disease & Injury Factsheets Data. Under its terms, non-commercial users may use, share and modify the data once they register a free account.

Two boundary conditions matter as much as the grant itself. Download-limit increases are reviewed case by case, so bulk extraction beyond default caps is a negotiation, not a setting. And requests for global-level paper data from the public are not approved - some aggregations simply stay inside IHME.

The consequence is asymmetric risk. An academic team can register and start downloading the same day; a commercial team doing identical analysis infringes unless it first licenses the data from IHME, so procurement lead time differs by weeks or months. Products built on GBD tobacco estimates - dashboards, underwriting models, market sizing - inherit that obligation.

Even permitted users hit operational ceilings: case-by-case download-limit review means a pipeline sized on generous assumptions can stall mid-extraction. And because public global-level paper requests are refused, any plan that assumes the fullest aggregation is downloadable should be redesigned around the published extracts.

1. Classify your organization first. Commercial organizations need a license from IHME before use; register a free account only if your use is genuinely non-commercial.
2. Read the license field, not the landing page. All three resources - the GBD Results Tool query interface, the GBD 2019 Smoking Tobacco Use Prevalence record and the HealthData.org factsheets - carry this agreement in their licensing metadata.
3. Plan extraction inside default limits. Higher download limits are reviewed case by case, so size pipelines to the default cap and escalate early if you need more.
4. Check open-license alternatives. Compare against cc-by-4 sources when redistribution matters; attribution-only terms remove the negotiation entirely.
5. Verify downstream obligations survive derivatives. Modification is allowed for non-commercial users, but the agreement still governs what you share onward.

Adjacent concepts worth reading next: cc-by-4 and global-burden-of-disease.

Sector hub: tobacco data.