Creator Terms

In short. FactsFigs creators are engaged by FactsFigs to research, design and write what we publish. Work you make for us belongs to FactsFigs and carries your name. Every figure has to come from a source that is public, already published, and named, so a reader can open it and check — that is the standard we hold you to. FactsFigs is the publisher and FactsFigs is responsible for what it publishes. Nothing goes live without an editor approving it. There is no quota, no allowance, and nothing to buy.

These Creator Terms apply to everyone engaged by FactsFigs to create content for it. They sit alongside your individual agreement with us — which covers engagement, pay and duration — and incorporate the Content Policy by reference. Where your individual agreement and this page disagree, your agreement controls.

1. Who this is for

FactsFigs is not a user-generated-content site and does not accept unsolicited submissions. Creators are appointed: we open a place when there is a subject we want covered, and the account is created by us. There is no creator signup, no subscription, and no way to buy access. If you would like to be considered, there is a form at Write for FactsFigs.

2. Ownership and credit

Work you create for FactsFigs — the research, the visuals, the writing, the compiled datasets — belongs to FactsFigs, which is what lets us stand behind it, correct it, and answer for it. That is the trade: you are not carrying the liability for it either.

You are credited by name on every piece you make and on your own author page. Where your local law gives you moral rights — in particular the right to be identified as the author — those stay with you, and we would want to honour them regardless of what the law required.

Work you already owned. If you bring in something you made before joining, or outside your engagement, you keep it, and you give FactsFigs a non-exclusive, worldwide, royalty-free licence to use it in the piece it forms part of. Tell us at the time, so nobody has to reconstruct it later.

3. The sourcing standard

This is the part of the job that is not negotiable. Every number we publish must be:

• From a real, named source. An institution, agency, survey, registry, paper or dataset that exists and that we identify on the page.
• Already published, and public. We work from what the source has itself put out. We do not publish leaked, confidential, scraped-against-terms, or privately supplied data as though it were public.
• Checkable by a reader. Someone who doubts the chart must be able to reach the source and see the figure for themselves.
• Read faithfully. The chart has to be a fair reading of the dataset — including its date, its units, its coverage and what it leaves out. Where a figure is an estimate, disputed, or one of several competing measures, the story says so rather than presenting it as settled.

You also confirm that you have followed the source's own terms, including any attribution it requires, and that nothing you hand in infringes anyone's copyright, database right, trademark, privacy or publicity rights. If you later discover a problem in something you made — a misread column, a source that has been withdrawn — tell us. Nobody is in trouble for finding a mistake; leaving one in place is the problem.

4. What FactsFigs is responsible for

FactsFigs is the publisher, and the publisher is responsible for what it publishes. If a reader has a problem with a story, it is ours to answer, not yours to defend. We do not point at the person who drew the chart.

Concretely, we take responsibility for provenance: that each dataset behind a story is real, public, already published, correctly named, and faithfully read. We do not re-run other people's research, and publishing a figure is not a claim that the underlying study is right — it is a claim that we have reported the source accurately and shown you where to look. Where sources disagree, we would rather show the disagreement than pick the tidier number.

If we get something wrong, we correct the piece and say what changed. Tell us at ai@factsfigs.com; for copyright or legal complaints use the Notice & Takedown procedure.

5. Review and approval

Nothing you make goes live by itself. You submit; an editor reviews it and either approves it — at which point it publishes — or returns it with notes. Review covers whether the piece is well made and readable, whether it follows the Content Policy, whether it is original rather than reworked from somebody else's article, and whether every figure meets the sourcing standard in Section 3.

There is no quota, no credit and no allowance. Nothing is metered: you are not spending anything by submitting, and a rejection costs you nothing but the notes. Stories touching health, medicine or money get more scrutiny and may carry extra disclaimers, because being wrong about those costs readers more.

6. Data sources, maps and third-party terms

• Credit every source. Each visual names its data source in the attribution block, and that credit is baked into downloadable files.
• Database rights. In the EU and UK a sui generis database right can protect a dataset separately from copyright. Having permission to view data is not the same as having rights in the data.
• Third-party terms. Public sources often carry their own attribution or use conditions. Follow them.
• Maps. Downloadable maps are based on OpenStreetMap (ODbL, with attribution) or public-domain sources such as Natural Earth — never on providers whose terms forbid downloading or offline reuse of rendered tiles.

7. The editor and what you see inside it

The Visual Story Editor, the shared libraries, unpublished drafts, and anything else you see while working are FactsFigs' and are not for publication elsewhere while you are engaged with us. The shared shelves — elements, images, backgrounds, layouts, templates — are there for you to build with; stocking them is a designer's job, not yours. Your own uploads stay in your own workspace.

8. Pay

Pay, and any performance-related element of it, is set in your individual agreement with FactsFigs — not here, because it differs by engagement. Readers do not pay creators and creators do not pay FactsFigs. The only money readers spend on FactsFigs is an optional reader subscription that removes advertising and adds download rights; reading the site is free.

9. If you leave

• Published work stays published. It belongs to FactsFigs and remains live, and your byline stays on it — the credit is yours whether or not you still work with us.
• Reader rights survive. Anything a reader already downloaded stays governed by the licence that applied at the time.
• Your account closes. Access to the editor and the shared libraries ends with the engagement.

10. Changes and contact

You must follow the Content Policy and the acceptable-use rules in the Terms of Service. Plagiarism, fabricated or unsourced figures, and prohibited content may end an engagement.

FactsFigs may update this page; material changes are notified as described in the Terms of Service, and changes are not retrospective — they do not affect licence rights already exercised by readers, or anything in your individual agreement. Questions: ai@factsfigs.com.