Data licence

A plain statement of how we treat the material and what we allow. It is not a separate contract: the terms of service govern, and where the two ever differ the terms win. If your organisation needs something this page does not cover, ask us.

Every document here was published by a public body on its own website, and every record links to that original. The copyright stays with whoever holds it. For a government department or other Crown body that is Crown copyright; an NHS trust or an integrated care board holds the copyright in its own papers.

Many public bodies publish under the Open Government Licence v3.0, which permits re-use, including commercial re-use, provided the source is acknowledged. Where a body states that its material is under that licence, you may re-use the document on those terms. Where a document carries different terms, or none, those terms govern it and not ours, and the body is the one to ask.

When you re-use a document under the Open Government Licence, attribute it to the body that published it, with the statement the licence asks for: Contains public sector information licensed under the Open Government Licence v3.0.

These are our current terms on ownership, set out in plain words. They are not legal advice, and the terms of service govern.

The name and logo

The PublicPapers name and logo belong to Thinkbox Studios (UK) Ltd. Please do not use them in a way that suggests we produced, endorse or are connected with something we are not.

Our analysis and derived data

What we make from the documents is ours: Financial Surety scores, Tables, board pack comparisons, the categorisation of each paper, the figures extracted from the documents and the compiled database itself. It is proprietary to Thinkbox Studios (UK) Ltd and protected by copyright and database right.

What a subscriber may do with it

Use it for your own professional work, as set out below. You may not copy, scrape, redistribute or resell it, or use it to build a competing product or dataset.

The documents

The documents themselves remain the material of the bodies that published them. Nothing here claims them as ours, and where a body publishes under the Open Government Licence, that licence is what lets you re-use them.

Our own work on top of the documents: the catalogue, the individual papers read out of each pack, their categories and dates, the board lists, the statistics as we present them and the search. A subscription gives the person who holds it a licence to use that for their own professional work, including work for their employer and its clients.

You may

Quote passages and cite documents in advice, reports, articles, evidence and presentations; download the original documents for your own files; and record figures you found here in your own work.

You may not

Copy the catalogue in bulk or systematically, scrape it, redistribute or resell it, use it to build a competing dataset, or share one subscription between several people.

Cite the body that published the document, with the address of its original, which every record here carries. That is the authoritative copy. Cite PublicPapers only where the point is the catalogue itself: that a document was removed from a body’s website, for example, and our archive is where the copy survives.

One subscription is one person. For several people in one organisation, or for data in bulk, tell us what you need.

A public body that would rather we did not hold its papers, or believes we have misrepresented them, can write to hello@publicpapers.co.uk and a person will look at it.