GO asks that you include the GO Release version (e.g. 2024-03-28) in your publications. Why is this essential information?
Here’s one example: new terms are constantly being created, and often a larger number of terms are being merged or obsoleted:
Although we do our best to preserve existing annotations, sometimes terms are removed and any annotations to those terms may not be transferred to a more appropriate GO. We may also add a significant number of terms and/or annotations from one release to the next. This means that not only the ontology can change drastically, but the annotations can be quite different between releases. To make sure your work is reproducible, include the GO version for both annotations and ontology- but hopefully your tool of choice uses the same version for both!
Over 230 releases are available in our archives, dating back to 2004:
http://release.geneontology.org
You can always find the most recent release at http://current.geneontology.org/.