What is the recommended Ecoinvent-license purchase for educational purposes when annual updates are not necessary?

Question

Dear Sir/Madam,

As course responsible and course developer of “ENERGI102 – Life Cycle Assessment” at a Norwegian University, I have had the pleasure of utilizing openLCA and your free Agribalyse database as part of the student curriculum for three semesters now, just embarking on the fourth. I find it important that the students familiarize themselves with software-tools as part of the LCA-training, hence your freely available openLCA software has been valuable.

If I understand it correctly, the Agribalyse database is now only available as part of the purchase of an Ecoinvent license.

This is an obstacle I need to surpass to be able to provide the students with the promised curriculum this semester, and time has already flown by, as the students are supposed to download the database Wednesday February 14^th.

The student group annually consist of 50-60 students, and they need access to a database. Not a complex one, but a realistic one they can practice with for simple processes such as food dishes/travels/small items etc. 

I see in your webpages that your options 1.) “Yearly License (Educational Multi-User)” lies at a price of €1500, and your 2.) “Educational Multi-User License” lies at €3800. However, I find it unclear from your webpage what the different solutions entail. My questions are:

• For option 1.), does the access to the Ecoinvent database-file expire after a year, or does it simply just not include subsequent updates database-files?
• For option 2.), What does the full license entail and for how long does it last?

 As this is for educational purposes, the budget is very limited, and I need to understand the differences between the two options. The students do not need fully updated numbers every year, they simply need access to something that seems realistic. That is why the Agribalyse database has previously been sufficient for our needs. As I understand it now, we need an Ecoinvent database-license, but I need to understand which one, hence I need more information on prices, access and limitations.

 I look forward to your response.

Answer 1

Hi, thank you for your long explanation, and believe us please that it was not our decision to remove the free option for agribalyse (but: Ademe's, maybe inspired by ecoinvent, but I am speculating here). The yearly license is only valid for one year, thus the other option 2 is better for you, since the license is valid until infinity. You can decide to get updates for 750 € per year with this option, but this is not mandatory.

Maybe Agribalyse is updated also every year and then requires an up-to-date ecoinvent, but maybe also not, we will need to see this in future, and you can of course continue using the current version without updating it.

All the best,

Andreas