Publishing Policy

A plain definition

What Is a Publishing Policy?

A publishing policy is an organization's own standards for what it publishes, written in its own words and kept on a public record.

There is no universal rulebook: organizations are held to the standards they publish, and to those of any community they've chosen to publish in.

What goes in one is theirs to decide: sourcing, corrections, whether AI wrote it, what happens when they get something wrong. All of it, some of it, or commitments nobody else has thought to make.

What makes it different from an internal style guide or a terms-of-service page: a publishing policy is self-defined (not imposed by a regulator), publicly stated (not kept internal), and independently citable (licensed CC-BY once published, so anyone can reference it).

What Makes It Different

Self-defined, not imposed

You decide what your standards are, and what they cover. A tabloid and an academic journal have different standards, and that is fine. What matters is that you state yours.

Publicly stated, not internal

It is not an internal style guide or a terms-of-service page. It is published, verified to your domain, and meant to be read by the audiences who depend on you.

Independently citable

Published policies are CC-BY licensed and timestamped, so anyone can reference your commitments — and you cannot quietly walk them back.

Malpublishing

“Malpublish” /mal-PUB-lish/ (verb)

To publish in a manner that violates a publishing policy you operate under.

Term coined March 2023 by Roarke Clinton. malpublish.org

In practice, that means failing to live up to a publishing policy you operate under. If a policy commits you to two-source verification, publishing without it is malpublishing. If it commits you to disclosing AI-generated content, publishing it undisclosed is malpublishing. The failure follows from the commitment, which is why nothing is malpublishing everywhere. A tabloid and an academic journal have different standards, and that is exactly as it should be.

An honest mistake, caught and corrected promptly and in public, is not malpublishing. Knowing about it and leaving it standing is.

Which policies you operate under

Not only the ones you wrote. A policy governs whoever publishes under it, and there are three ways that happens. Each one is declared in public, by someone who is on the record themselves, so nobody has to rule on whether a policy applies to you.

You wrote it

Your organization published its standards, so your organization is held to them. The failure is yours even when the keystrokes were an intern’s: the promise was made in your name.

You joined the body that wrote it

An attorney is held to her state bar’s standards because she swore in. Nobody imposed them from outside; membership is the promise. And it travels with her — the bar’s standards reach her firm’s website, her posts, her billboard. The body publishes its policy, and is held to it in turn.

You publish through a surface it governs

A student in a university journal, a user on a platform. This one does not travel: it governs what you publish there, and stops at that surface’s edge. The policy has to be public before you publish, and you are held to the version that was public then. A surface that applies its policy to one person and waives it for another is breaking its own word.

The last two differ in reach. A policy you joined travels with you. A policy of the place you publish stops at its edge. They stack: an attorney posting on a platform operates under both, and can fall short of either.

The law is not one of these routes. Nobody joined it, and a legislature is not held to its own press regulation, so the law never tells you what your standards are. Malpublishing is measured against the policies you operate under, never against a statute. What the law has always done is take promises seriously — the privacy policy became meaningful long before any privacy-policy law existed, because regulators treated breaking your own posted policy as deceiving the public. Publishing a policy hands nobody new power over you. It puts your word where it can be read, and whatever weight your promises carry is the weight promises have always carried. The longer legal story is here.

The term, the layers, and the failures policies most often name have their own reference. malpublish.org →

Does “publishing” include you?

Almost certainly. Publishing is deciding what reaches people — and if your URL creates, commissions, or curates what an audience sees, that decision is yours. The full definition, and the thirty-year story behind the word, has its own page.

What counts as publishing? →

The fastest way to understand one is to read one

Or browse the directory of published policies.

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