As announced in our last newsletter, ecoinvent will publish version 3 of its database in June 2012. For existing customers we offer now – until the end of the year – the upgrade of their license to version v3 with a 20% discount on the official upgrade price, i.e. only EUR 1'500 instead of EUR 1'875 per upgrade (the upgrade of multiuser licenses, from the 2nd license on, costs EUR 750 per license instead of EUR 950) if you order this upgrade before December 31, 2011.
New customers continue to profit from the special offer announced on the LCM conference in Berlin:
purchase a license of ecoinvent v3 NOW, and get immediate access to the current ecoinvent v2.2 at no additional costs! The price is EUR 2'500 (for a single-user, commercial licence) resp. EUR 1'250 for all (additional) multi-user licences.
Included in all cases is one year of the maintenance fee; starting with the release date of version 3. In order to profit from this offer, please go on the following pages (for an educational license – upgrade or new license – please contact support@ecoinvent.org.
We would kindly remind you that all data submitted before January 1, 2012, are guaranteed to be included into the new release of the ecoinvent database – i.e. ecoinvent v3; under the condition that these data fulfill the quality requirements of ecoinvent (documented in the quality guidelines that can be found on our website at www.ecoinvent.org/ecoinvent-v3/quality-guidelines/).
The next generation of our database will offer you a broad variety of new elements, of new modeling principles. Within a small series in our newsletter, we would like to present to you some highlights out of these new features – in this newsletter the new "system models".
Today, the ecoinvent database contains only one system model, following an attributional approach with allocation rules for multi-output processes according to the recommendations of the individual data providers. Version 3 will contain several system models, all of which are used to create fully independent and self-contained model implementations out of the same unlinked ecoinvent data. The system model "Allocation by true value" uses the same attributional approach as previous ecoinvent version. Other, new system models are for example "Allocation by revenue", a model consistently using economic data for allocation, and "Substitution, constrained markets and technologies", following a small-scale, consequential modeling approach.
As an ecoinvent database user, your first important choice is therefore to determine which system model you want to use, according to the goal and scope definition of your project. It is vital to be aware of which system model version you are using in your projects, and to communicate this openly when talking about results based on these data.