Can I include NIST data in my research software which lies on GitHub? For some research software I have written, I needed some atomic data from NIST. I wanted to put that software onto GitHub (MIT license) but I am not sure if I am allowed to simply also upload the NIST dataset which I need. The NIST copyright page is not too helpful here, it only tells me how to cite the NIST dataset in a paper.
The source code has some comments in it clearly stating the origin of the data, same for a readme file. Would you consider that as enough?
Their copyright page seems fairly clear to me.  It even goes into what to do if you create derivative works based on it.  That said, best practice would be to include the download as part of the code.  Most platforms have the ability to retrieve a url, for example, if the data is available that way.  Also, note that Github is not really intended to store datasets, though it will work for that if the dataset is relatively small.  It can greatly slow down other work on the rep though.
If you're unable to include the download as part of the code, perhaps include a set of &quot;data download instructions&quot; in the readme.md file. That alone would be more than I'm used to seeing - many times when I've seen the code from published research, it's provided as if you already know how to get all the data yourself.