Status

Research Preview

By participating in this phase, you are an early pioneer helping to stress-test and refine the tools that will establish a new standard for trust on the web.

Publishing Policy (publishingpolicy.org) is under active development.

Open to everyone

Publishing is free and open to all organizations. You can draft your policy, verify your domain, and publish your commitments to the public record today.

1. Define your standards

Walk through a guided process to articulate standards for everything your organization publishes.

2. Verify your domain

Prove you control your URL. Verification is persistent and does not require arbitrary yearly renewals.

3. Publish to the record

Publishing generates a public policy page, a distribution kit, and an immutable cryptographic record.

What happens when you publish a policy

Your policy is tagged Research Preview.

Every policy published during this phase carries a visible Research Preview label—both on the web and stamped onto your PDF exports. The platform is in active development, so you might see UI changes, but the label also signals that you are an early pioneer helping to establish a new paradigm of trust.

Time-bounded commitments.

Published policies become permanent public records of what you committed to, and exactly when. A policy only applies to the period it was active. If you update or deactivate your policy, you are not held to old terms going forward. The ledger simply proves what rules were in effect at any given point in time.

Published content is openly licensed.

When you publish a policy, it is licensed CC-BY 4.0. Anyone who quoted or shared it keeps that right, even if you later replace or deactivate it. This is by design: a publishing policy is a public commitment, and public commitments should be citable.

You can always leave.

Deactivate a policy at any time — it is marked as no longer in effect — and close your account whenever you like. If we update the Terms and you disagree, you can withdraw without accepting them. Acceptance is required to use the platform, never to leave it. What leaving does not do is erase a record that was already public.

You always have a copy.

When you publish or update a policy, we email you the full content with a timestamp. If the platform disappears tomorrow, your inbox has the record.

Your account is a separate thing.

Closing your account always works, and it always deletes your personal data — your profile, your email address, your login. What stays is the policy text you chose to publish and the dates it was in effect: the record, not the person.

Nothing has a price. Payment is off.

The product is free to use, with no paid tier behind it: records, verification, and the full history are not for sale, and the costs of running the record are what patronage is for. If a paid feature ever exists, it will start only with clear notice and your explicit consent, and leaving is always free: closing your account never costs anything.

Publisher analytics.

Publishers will be able to see how their policy is being viewed and referenced, helping them understand the reach of their commitments.

What help looks like

We answer questions about how Publishing Policy works — verifying a domain, publishing, editing, or setting up the extension.

We do not review or advise on the content of your policy: what you commit to is yours to decide, and nobody else should be setting it. Email us and we'll reply when we can; there's no guaranteed response time during the Research Preview.

Legal agreements

This page is the plain-language summary. The formal terms govern your use of the platform:

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