We thought we’d take the time to make a pledge to you that reflects our vision for this company and the ethics that we strive to follow.
1. Editing And Publishing Submissions.
Our editing and publishing sections will strive to avoid conflicts of interest and inappropriate conduct through the following means:
- If an author submits a writing project to one of these sections and it is accepted, that project will be banned from consideration in the other one.
- The author may submit a future project for consideration in either section, but it must not be in the same series.
- Example: If you submit Book 1, you can’t submit Books 2 and 3, but you can submit another Book 1.
- We do not charge any hidden fees for editing services except when it is required to complete a job or noted in our Service Agreement. In general, what you see is what you get.
- We will never charge prospective authors for publishing submissions.
2. Fair Use, Creative Commons, and DMCA Adherence.
At certain points, our company may be required to use content from other authors for our various sites. We strive to be open and honest about our usage of this content:
- We strive to adhere to the doctrine of Fair Use for any content that is not our own, which protects the creation of satire, criticism, and commentary.
- In the event that the content is licensed under Creative Commons, we will make every attempt to appropriately follow the terms of the license unless the work does not require it.
- We also take the Digital Millennium Copyright Act and associated laws very seriously. If you feel that a piece of our work is not in compliance with these laws, please use the General Inquiries address in the “Contact Us” section of our site. We will review the content in question and try to resolve the issue in an appropriate way.
3. General Ethics Practices.
In some cases, our sites may do interviews or participate in other activities that may require additional disclosure. We aim to inform the public through the following means:
- In the event that a product was provided to us for free in exchange for an honest review, we shall disclose that fact to you.
- We do not accept money or other gifts from outside sources in exchange for positive coverage.
- In the event that our members or employees are invited to sponsored events, we will disclose if anything has been paid for by the host. The purpose of attending these events will be to provide information to our readers, not to shill for a product or service.
4. Writing Practices.
Our sites may report based on facts, allegations, or opinions at any given time. We try to follow standards of excellence in the following ways:
- In the event that we get facts wrong, we will aim to correct them as soon as we possibly can with an appropriate disclosure in the article.
- We strive to cite our sources whenever we can. We want to be worthy of your trust.
- Our sites make every attempt to avoid the usage of unfounded allegations in our writing. In the event that it cannot be done, we try to provide evidence in the form of photographs, text, cited sources, and so on.
- We may edit our blog posts from time to time in order to deal with issues like word choice, spelling errors, and so on. If there’s a substantive issue with a given article, we will make every attempt to inform the public of each change.
5. Business Practices.
From time to time, our sites or operations may have more generalized problems. We shall try to inform you of these in the following ways:
- Although we don’t store much information on our sites, we shall try to inform you at least once per year of issues related to being online, such as malware, hacking, or other problems unless no such issues have occurred.
This policy may be updated at certain points, but we’ll keep you informed about that!
Instituted on 3/20/2017. Latest Update: 7/7/2020.