Terms of Service

Thank you for using Publishing Policy. We built this platform to help organizations define, publish, and be accountable to their own publishing standards. These Terms of Service (“Terms”) govern your use of the platform.

When we say “Company,” “we,” “us,” or “our” in this document, we mean Publishing Policy, currently operated by Roarke Clinton with plans to incorporate as a 501(c)(3) nonprofit organization. When we say “Service” or “Services,” we mean the Publishing Policy platform at publishingpolicy.org, including all features, content, and APIs. When we say “you” or “your,” we mean you as the person or organization using the Service.

By using the Service, you agree to these Terms. If you do not agree, do not use the Service. We may update these Terms in the future. Changes are tracked, and we update the date at the top of this page whenever we make significant changes. Continued use of the Service after changes constitutes acceptance of the updated Terms.

These Terms are versioned. The current version is noted at the top of this page. When the platform transitions between editions (e.g., from Research Preview to general availability), updated Terms will be published as a new version, and you will be asked to review and accept them before continuing. We also reserve the right to require acceptance of updated Terms for significant changes within an edition. Even when acceptance of updated Terms is required to continue using the platform, you always retain the ability to unpublish your policies and delete your content and account without accepting. The acceptance requirement applies to publishing, re-publishing, and active platform use — never to content withdrawal.

Preview period

We will provide clear notice when the Preview period is ending. At that transition, all published policies will be automatically unpublished — reverted to private drafts. You will review the updated Terms and decide whether to re-publish before any permanence features take effect.

Account terms

1. You must be at least 13 years old to use the Service. If you are in the European Union, you must be at least 16 years old. By creating an account, you represent that you meet the applicable age requirement.
2. You are responsible for maintaining the security of your account. We use passwordless authentication via magic links sent to your email address. You are responsible for maintaining access to the email address associated with your account.
3. You are responsible for all content posted to and activity that occurs under your account.
4. You must be a human. Accounts registered by automated methods (bots, scripts, or other non-human agents) are not permitted.
5. Publisher accounts and reader accounts. Anyone can browse published policies without an account. Creating a publisher account allows you to create and manage policies. We may introduce reader accounts in the future that allow reporting without the ability to create policies.
6. You may not use the Service for any purpose outlined in our Use Restrictions policy.

Content ownership and licensing

1. You own your content. The publishing policies, organizational information, and other content you create through the Service remain yours. We claim no ownership rights over your content.
2. Published policies are publicly licensed. When you publish a policy (move it from draft to published), you license that policy content under Creative Commons Attribution 4.0 International (CC-BY 4.0). This means anyone — journalists, researchers, the public — may share, quote, and reference your published policy with attribution. This license is irrevocable: once a policy is published, the public's right to examine and share it cannot be withdrawn. This is by design. A publishing policy exists to be examined by the public. An organization cannot use copyright to suppress scrutiny of its own stated commitments.
3. Drafts are not publicly licensed. Policies in draft status remain private and are not subject to any public license. The CC-BY 4.0 license applies only at the moment of publication. You may keep a policy in draft as long as you wish before deciding to publish.
4. During the Preview period.The CC-BY 4.0 license applies when you publish a policy during Preview, just as it does after Preview. If you delete a policy during Preview, it is removed from the platform — but the CC-BY 4.0 rights that applied while it was published are not retroactively revoked. This is how CC-BY 4.0 works by design: it is an irrevocable license. The Preview period's flexibility is in your ability to delete and remove content from the platform, not in modifying the terms of a public license.
5. You grant us a license to operate the Service. In addition to the public CC-BY license, you grant us a non-exclusive, worldwide, royalty-free license to store, display, distribute, and make available your content as part of the Service. This license exists solely to operate the Service as intended — to display your publishing policy publicly, include it in the directory, generate badges and share links, and provide related functionality.
6. Permanent public records.After the Preview period ends, publishing a policy creates a permanent public record. While you retain ownership of your content, the public record of what was published and when will persist even if you later deactivate the policy or delete your account. We will not take a published record down because you ask us to. The only thing that removes one is a valid legal demand — and when that happens, we mark the record instead of letting it vanish. By publishing a policy after the Preview period, you acknowledge and consent both to this permanence and to that one exception. See the “public nature” section below, and Removal under legal compulsion.
7. The platform's source code.The Publishing Policy codebase is intended to be released as source-available under the Business Source License 1.1 (BSL 1.1). It is not yet publicly available. You may not use the platform's code or design to operate a competing publishing-policy or standards platform.
8. All content posted on the Service must comply with U.S. copyright law. You must have the right to post any content you submit.

The public nature of published policies

Publishing Policy exists to make publishing standards transparent and publicly verifiable. This section describes what that means for your content:

1. Published policies are public.When you publish a policy (change its status from “draft” to “published”), it becomes publicly accessible. It will appear in the public directory, have a shareable URL, and may be indexed by search engines. This is the core purpose of the Service.
2. Draft policies are private. Policies in draft status are visible only to you. You control when (and whether) to publish.
3. Version history is part of the public record. When you update a published policy, the previous version is preserved. This version history is publicly accessible. The ability to see how a policy has changed over time is an essential accountability feature of the Service. Each policy URL displays a chronological timeline of all versions with their start and end dates.
4. Published policies are permanent (after Preview).Once the Preview period ends, publishing a policy creates a permanent public record. A published policy can be deactivated — marked as no longer in effect — but we will not remove it from the public record at your request, or at anyone else's. Think of it like a public filing: you can amend or supersede it, but you cannot take the original back because you wish you had not filed it. There is exactly one exception, and it is narrow: we remove a record when the law requires us to, and when that happens we say so in the record rather than letting it disappear. See Removal under legal compulsion below.
5. During the Preview period, everything is deletable.While the Service is in Preview, you can fully delete any policy you create. Nothing is permanent until after the Preview ends. At that transition, all published policies are automatically unpublished (reverted to private drafts). You will need to accept the updated Terms and explicitly re-publish to make any policy part of the permanent record. Deletion during the Preview period is total: it removes the policy, all of its version history, and all associated data from the platform. Version history is visible during Preview as a preview of the accountability mechanism — but it is not yet permanent and is included in deletion.
6. “No Recorded Policy” profiles. Any URL or domain can be looked up on the Service. If no policy is on record for that URL, the Service will indicate that no publishing policy has been recorded in our registry. This does not constitute an editorial judgment — it is simply a factual statement about the state of our registry. It is not a statement that the organization lacks publishing standards; we report only what is on record here.
7. You can deactivate (after Preview). You may deactivate a published policy, which marks it as no longer in effect. The policy will no longer appear as active in the directory, but the historical record — including all versions and their effective dates — remains publicly accessible. Deactivating is not deleting: it is the most an organization can do to its own record of its own accord. Cached copies may also persist in search engines and web archives.

Reports

Publishing Policy is building a public reporting mechanism. It is not available yet. This section describes the terms that will govern it:

1. What a report is. Users with accounts may file a report that references a published policy and a published record. A report points at those two public documents. It is not a legal finding and not a platform judgment. Publishing Policy renders no verdict about any organization or person, and does not decide whether a policy was followed.
2. Account required to report. Browsing published policies is free and does not require an account. Filing a report requires a registered account so that reports can be attributed and abuse can be managed.
3. Good faith participation. Reports must be filed in good faith. Filing false or misleading reports, or using the reporting mechanism to harass organizations or individuals, is a violation of our Use Restrictions.
4. No guarantee of compliance verification. We do not independently verify whether an organization complies with its own published policy. The Service is a transparency and accountability tool — not a compliance auditor or regulatory body.

Use restrictions

We outline specific prohibited uses in our separate Use Restrictions policy. In summary, you may not use the Service to:

• Impersonate an organization you do not represent
• Create policies that contain hate speech, threats, or illegal content
• File false or misleading violation reports
• Interfere with the security or operation of the Service
• Extract data from accounts that do not belong to you
• Use the Service in a way that violates applicable law

Violating these restrictions may result in suspension or termination of your account.

Domain verification and representation

1. When you create a policy for a domain or URL, you represent that you have the authority to speak for that domain or the organization it represents. Creating a policy for a domain you do not own or are not authorized to represent is a violation of these Terms.
2. Domain verification (via DNS record, well-known file, meta tag, or bio link) is available to prove ownership. Verification is reflected on your policy's record and your organization's profile. However, verification is not mandatory to create a policy. Verifying a domain confirms you control it. It is not a certification, rating, or endorsement of your policy — we do not assess or grade policies.
3. Verification is point-in-time. Domain verification confirms that you controlled a domain at the time of verification. Verification may expire and require renewal. We may periodically re-verify domain ownership to ensure accuracy. If your verification expires, your policy remains visible but its verification status will be updated to reflect that it is no longer current.
4. Domain ownership changes.Domains can be sold, transferred, or expire. If a domain changes hands, the previous owner's policy record remains permanently attributed to them — it represents their commitments during the period they controlled the domain. The new domain owner is not bound by the previous owner's published policies and cannot edit, claim, or inherit them. A new domain owner may verify their own ownership and create their own policy. The public record will clearly distinguish between policies published by different owners of the same domain over time.
5. Historical attribution persists.When you publish a policy, it is permanently attributed to you — not to the domain itself. If you later lose control of the domain, the historical record remains: “Published by [your organization], who verified ownership of [domain] from [date] to [date].” This ensures that the permanent record accurately reflects who made which commitments and when.
6. We do not guarantee the accuracy or truthfulness of any publishing policy on the platform. A policy represents the organization's self-reported commitments. We do not verify whether organizations actually follow their stated standards.
7. If you believe someone has created a policy impersonating your organization, or if you are the new owner of a domain with an existing policy from a previous owner, contact us at team@publishingpolicy.org and we will investigate.

Cancellation and termination

1. The Service is currently free. No payment is required and no billing information is collected. If we introduce paid features in the future, we will provide clear notice and will not charge you without your explicit consent.
2. You may request cancellation of your account at any time by emailing team@publishingpolicy.org. During the Preview period, cancellation will delete all your account data, policies, and associated content. After the Preview period, account data will be deleted but published policy content will remain as part of the permanent public record, as described in our Privacy Policy. Closing your account is not a way to withdraw a policy you published. The only thing that removes a published record is a valid legal demand (see Removal under legal compulsion).
3. We reserve the right to suspend or terminate your account if you violate these Terms or our Use Restrictions. We will make reasonable efforts to notify you before taking action, except in cases where the violation poses an immediate risk to the Service or other users.
4. Abuse — verbal, physical, written, or otherwise — directed at anyone associated with Publishing Policy will result in immediate account termination.

Uptime, security, and privacy

1. Your use of the Service is at your sole risk. We provide the Service on an “as is” and “as available” basis. We do not offer a service-level agreement, but we take the availability and reliability of the Service seriously.
2. We take measures to protect and secure your data through encryption in transit (TLS), encryption at rest, passwordless authentication, and row-level security policies in our database. For details, see our Privacy Policy.
3. When you use the Service, you entrust us with your data. You agree that we may process your data as described in our Privacy Policy and for no other purpose. We access your data only to provide the Service, debug technical issues, respond to support requests, or investigate potential abuse — and in each case, only to the minimum extent necessary.
4. We use third-party service providers (Supabase, Vercel, and Resend) to operate the Service. These providers process your data solely to deliver their services to us, as described in our Privacy Policy.

Liability

In plain terms: the Service hosts self-reported publishing standards. We do not verify that organizations follow their stated policies. We are not liable if an organization violates its own published standards, or if a policy is inaccurate, incomplete, or misleading.

The Service is a platform for transparency — not an enforcement mechanism or compliance auditor. The value of a publishing policy comes from the public commitment itself and the accountability that transparency creates — not from any guarantee or warranty on our part.

Governing law and disputes

1. These Terms are governed by and construed in accordance with the laws of the State of Hawaii and applicable federal laws of the United States, without regard to conflict of law principles.
2. Any disputes arising from these Terms or your use of the Service should first be addressed by contacting us directly at team@publishingpolicy.org. We believe most issues can be resolved through good-faith communication.
3. If a provision of these Terms is found to be unenforceable, the remaining provisions will continue in full effect.
4. Our failure to exercise or enforce any right or provision of these Terms does not constitute a waiver of that right or provision.

Contact

Questions about these Terms? Get in touch: