Policy & Rights — Ulrich Warring

Canonical Status

This page is the canonical policy document for the site. It states, in one place, what may be reused and under what terms, how publication pages are tiered, which site-level invariants hold, and how governance limitations are disclosed. The repository file CONTENT-LICENCE.md mirrors the licence portion of this page; where the two diverge, this HTML governs.

The site is a public-facing Coastline: it documents invariant facts about research, teaching, and affiliations. Interpretive prose around each paper is Sail content, free to evolve. Bibliographic facts and rights metadata are locks; framings and summaries are keys.

Content Licence Regime

The site declares four distinct regimes. The existing repository LICENSE file (MIT) continues to govern code only.

Scope	Licence / regime	Attribution requirement
Code	MIT	Copyright notice preserved.
Prose / written content	CC BY-SA 4.0	Attribution to Ulrich Warring, uwarring82.github.io/me, link to licence, and share-alike on derivatives.
Portrait `photo.png`	All rights reserved	No reuse without written permission. Personality rights and copyright both protected.
Redrawn schematics on publication pages	CC BY 4.0	Attribution to U. Warring; per-figure caption states licence inline.

Third-party content (publisher-typeset articles, figures originating elsewhere) is governed by the rights of the originating work — not by any regime above. No such content is mirrored on this site; see INV 01.

Publication Tier Definitions

Every paper page defaults to Tier C. Tier A and Tier B are per-paper exceptions, opted into individually with explicit rights verification. Permission is not obligation — a paper that could be hosted at Tier A may be hosted at Tier C for editorial restraint.

Tier C — Summary only (default)

Author summary in the site’s voice, DOI as primary link, optional arXiv link, optional one redrawn website schematic clearly labelled “Website figure, not from the article.” No manuscript or publisher content hosted.

Worked example. A 2018 PRA paper under a subscription licence: hosted as a Tier C summary with DOI and arXiv link; an explanatory schematic redrawn by the author is marked as a website figure.

Tier B — Accepted manuscript (opt-in)

Author-accepted manuscript hosted as document or HTML conversion, with a banner stating “Author-accepted manuscript. Not the typeset version of record. Refer to the DOI for the published article.” Author-owned figure panels only, after panel-by-panel verification.

Preconditions: (i) publisher self-archiving rules permit; (ii) any embargo has expired; (iii) co-author consultation is logged with outcome approved (see co-author courtesy and the 14-day fallback).

Worked example. A 2014 PRL: after the journal’s self-archiving terms are confirmed and a co-author-consultation record is filed, the accepted manuscript may be hosted. If any figure panel originates from a third party, that panel is redrawn or omitted.

Tier A — Version of record under open licence (opt-in)

Full text and all figures with can_host: true. Banner carries the attribution string required by the licence (e.g. CC BY 4.0). Third-party panels handled separately via discriminant_action in the paper’s rights.json.

Worked example. The 2025 Nature Communications paper, published CC BY 4.0: after panel-by-panel figure-rights verification, the version of record is hosted with the CC BY attribution string inline; any embedded third-party element identified during verification is resolved via its own discriminant_action before promotion to Tier A.

Site-Level Invariants

These constraints hold across every page. They are never silently relaxed; any change requires an explicit blueprint revision and is reflected here before implementation.

No publisher-generated HTML is mirrored. Hosted text must be one of: (a) author-written summary, (b) author-accepted manuscript under self-archiving rules, (c) lawfully reusable open-access full text prepared for this site under its licence.
Figures are evaluated panel by panel. A document-level licence does not automatically clear embedded third-party material.
No third-party tracking, badges, or metrics widgets. No external data flows beyond direct DOI, arXiv, ORCID, or Scholar links the reader chooses to follow.
Permission is not obligation. A paper that could be hosted at Tier A may be hosted at Tier C for editorial restraint.
Every licence: “unverified” carries a discriminant_action. No silent ambiguities; CI enforces this on the publication registry.
policy/index.html is canonical for any rights, licence, or governance question. Repository files mirror; this page governs in conflict.
publications.json is a generated artefact. Hand-editing it is forbidden; CI enforces idempotence against the source rights.json files.

Figure Rights

Figures are evaluated panel by panel. A paper whose text is available under an open licence does not thereby clear each embedded figure or panel — third-party material retains its own rights, and the paper’s rights.json records them per figure, with a can_host decision per panel. Where clearance is pending, a discriminant_action states how the ambiguity will be resolved (publisher portal response, redraw, omission) and by when.

Co-author Courtesy

For multi-author works, co-author notification is a site-policy precondition for any manuscript-tier hosting (Tier B or Tier A). It is not a claim that consultation is generally legally required; it is how this site chooses to conduct itself.

14-day fallback (Tier B only). Tier B requires site_policy.coauthors.lead_author_consulted: true with site_policy.coauthors.consultation_outcome: “approved”. If consultation receives no response within 14 calendar days, the paper defaults to Tier C, site_policy.coauthors.fallback_applied: true is recorded, and the deferral is documented in audit.auditor_note. This prevents Tier B from being indefinitely blocked by unanswered email.

Tier A. For a Tier A promotion (version of record under an open licence), co-author consultation remains a precondition, but the 14-day automatic fallback does not apply: Tier A is always a per-paper editorial decision, not a timer-driven default.

Embargoes

Embargoes are tracked separately for each text layer: preprint, accepted manuscript, and version of record. A paper may be free of preprint embargo while the accepted manuscript is still embargoed; the three are independent decisions. Each paper’s rights.embargo_until records the binding date for the tier under consideration; where a tier promotion awaits an embargo lift, the discriminant_action states the lift date.

Governance: Present Limitations

This site applies audit-first to its own audit system. The following limitations are declared rather than disguised:

A single auditor (U. Warring).
No second pair of eyes on rights decisions.
An annual audit cadence.
No formal escalation path if the auditor is unavailable.

These are acceptable at the present scale and are surfaced here so that readers can calibrate trust accordingly. A change to any of them requires an explicit blueprint revision reflected on this page.

Audit notice Where a rights decision on this site depends on a single auditor’s judgement and that judgement is contested, the contested item is demoted to Tier C pending resolution. In all cases, the DOI remains the authoritative reference to the published work; this site does not claim authority over the underlying research record.

Contact for Rights Queries

Rights queries, take-down requests, and co-author objections: ulrich.warring@physik.uni-freiburg.de. A written acknowledgement is sent within 14 calendar days. Tier demotions requested in good faith are applied promptly.

See also: attribution-templates.html for the allowed notice_template values referenced by each paper’s rights.json.