As provided by Nouri Najjar (Ivey Business School, Western University, Canada), the following template correspondence may be useful:
Email to: UN Subscriptions Department subscriptions@un.org
The COMTRADE policy on use and re-dissemination states that re-dissemination is allowed, but a license and fee may be required. The policy states that no fee or license is needed if fewer than 100,000 records are being disclosed and there is no charge to access the disclosed data (i.e., at the replication package repository). The policy also states that no fee or license is needed for a “large number of records” for existing active UN Comrade subscribers as well, provided no access charge is levied (this may mean that a paid subscriber can share any amount of data). The COMTRADE subscription page may also be helpful: https://shop.un.org/databases#Comtrade.
In the email, include the following information:
disclose or publish)Hello,
I am a professor at (YOUR UNIVERSITY). A co-author (NAME) and I have a paper that has been accepted for publication in the academic journal (NAME OF JOURNAL). This outlet is a leading economics journal published by the (ASSOCIATION / DEPARTMENT / PUBLISHER).
Journals published by the (ASSOCIATION) require all empirical papers accepted for publication to be accompanied by a replication package (see data availability requirements here (LINK TO JOURNAL POLICY)). As the name suggests, this package must provide all non-confidential data and code required to replicate all results in the paper. I am reaching out to you as the analysis in our paper used data from the UN Comtrade Database. I’m emailing to confirm that we have permission to repost this data in our replication package. Below I describe the UN Comtrade data we use in our analysis, how the data is used in our analysis, and how the replication package will be managed. I believe our case satisfies the UN Comtrade exception on re-dissemination.
The UN Comtrade data we use in our analysis covers commodity level imports to (LIST OF COUNTRIES) from (YEARS) (approximately 55,000 records). We use annual data reported at the 6-digit Harmonized System code level. We do not disaggregate by country: we only consider total world imports.
We use this data to construct an industry-level trade-weighted tariff measure (PROVIDE A TWO-SENTENCE SUMMARY OF WHAT YOU DO WITH THE DATA)…
Storage and dissemination: The data would be stored as a series of CSV files within our replication package. There would be eleven files in total, one for each year of UN Comtrade data (YEARS). In total, there would be fewer than 55,000 records re-disseminated from the UN Comtrade data. The replication package itself is to be hosted on the (JOURNAL REPOSITORY). Users must register for a free account to be able to download replication files.
The replication package has been reviewed by the (JOURNAL’S) data editor and satisfies all appropriate copyright and licensing requirements. As far as I can tell, our situation satisfies the UN Comtrade exceptions around re-dissemination without a fee, as we have fewer than 100,000 records in a free-of-charge analytics application. However, the (JOURNAL) data editor has advised us to seek written permission to include the UN Comtrade data in our replication package.
If we are unable to include the UN Comtrade data in our replication package, prospective users would have to manually download the data themselves and add it to the replication package. Although the UN Comtrade data is easily accessible, this puts the reliability of our replication package at risk. User error and innocuous changes to file names or variable names in the UN Comtrade data may cause the replication to fail. We would greatly appreciate the ability to share the data in our replication package, so as to ease replication for future researchers.
In case you are interested, I have attached a copy of the paper for which this replication package has been created.
Thank you very much for your consideration.