Terms of Service

Thank you for using Publishing Policy. We built this platform to help workspaces 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 and its date are noted at the top of this page. A significant change is published as a new version, and we may ask you to review and accept it before you continue to publish or use the platform. Even then, you always retain the ability to delete your policies and close your account without accepting. The acceptance requirement applies to publishing and active platform use — never to content withdrawal.

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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. Deleting does not revoke the license.If you delete a policy, 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. Deleting removes content from the platform; it does not modify 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. The public record.While a policy is published, its current text and its version history are public at its address. Today you can delete a policy you published, with its history; the “public nature” section below states what the record keeps. We do not take a published record down because someone else asks us to. Today a published record can be removed in three ways: you delete it; another workspace proves control of its domain by a DNS record (see Domain ownership changes), which removes it with its history and leaves no marker; or a valid legal demand requires it. Leaving a marker where a legally removed record was is not built yet. 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 waits seven days and then becomes the official version, publicly accessible at its address. It appears in the public directory 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's address lists its versions, each with the date it became the official version.
4. Deleting a published policy.Today you can delete any policy you created, published or not. Deletion is total: it removes the policy, all of its version history, and all associated data from the platform. Version history is public while a policy is published; it is the accountability mechanism of the record, and it is included in deletion. We do not remove a published record at anyone else's request. Two other things remove a record today: another workspace proving control of its domain (see Domain ownership changes), which removes it with its history and leaves no marker; and a legal requirement, for which a marker in the record's place is not built yet. See Removal under legal compulsion below.
5. “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.
6. You cannot deactivate a policy yet. Deactivating, which marks a published policy as no longer in effect and keeps its history public, is not built yet; it is listed at What's true today. Today the way to take a policy down is to delete it, with its history (above). Cached copies may 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 workspaces 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 (by a DNS record, or a bio link for an account without a domain) is available to prove ownership. Verification is reflected on your policy's record and your organization's profile. Verification is not needed to create or draft a policy; publishing a policy for a domain needs that domain's own DNS record. 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. Today a verification does not expire and is not re-checked. We may begin re-checking control of a domain; that change would be published as a new version of these Terms.
4. Domain ownership changes.Domains can be sold, transferred, or expire. The new domain owner is not bound by the previous owner's published policies. Today, when a different workspace proves control of a domain by its DNS record, the domain is removed from any other workspace that held it, together with that workspace's record for the domain and its version history. Keeping an earlier holder's record public, and attributed to them, when a domain changes hands is not built yet.
5. 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 workspaces actually follow their stated standards.
6. 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 close your account at any time by emailing team@publishingpolicy.org. Closing your account deletes your account data. What happens to your policies is stated in our Privacy Policy: today they are deleted with the account, with their history. A published record can also be removed against your wishes when another workspace proves control of its domain (see Domain ownership changes), or by 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 workspaces 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: