Legal
Terms of service
Who you are contracting with
PublicPapers is operated by Thinkbox Studios (UK) Ltd, a company registered in England and Wales, company number 17409614, registered office 82A James Carter Road, Mildenhall, IP28 7DE. In these terms, “we” and “us” mean that company.
What the service is
PublicPapers catalogues board and committee papers that public bodies have published themselves, and links to the original document in every case. Which bodies it holds today is on the about page. Browsing the catalogue and reading titles is free. A subscription adds full-text search across the papers we have captured.
We do not claim the papers are complete, current, or an official record. The organisation that published a paper is the authoritative source for it, and we always link back to them.
The papers themselves
The copyright in each document stays with whoever holds it: Crown copyright for a Crown body, and the body’s own for an NHS trust or an integrated care board. Many public bodies publish under the Open Government Licence, which permits commercial re-use provided the source is acknowledged. Where a document carries different terms, those terms govern it and not these. The data licence explains what this means in use.
What you pay for is the collection, the indexing and the search, not the underlying documents, which remain the property of whoever published them and are free to obtain from them directly.
If you are a public body and would prefer we did not hold your papers, tell us and we will remove them.
Intellectual property
The PublicPapers name and logo belong to Thinkbox Studios (UK) Ltd. Our own analysis and derived data, and the database that compiles them, are ours and are protected by copyright and database right. A subscription licenses them to you for your own professional use only; you may not copy, scrape, redistribute or resell them, or use them to build a competing product. The documents themselves remain the material of the bodies that published them. The intellectual property section of the data licence sets out what is ours and what is not.
Your subscription
Subscriptions are £19 per month or £179 per year, and renew automatically until cancelled. Prices include VAT where applicable. Payment is taken by Stripe; we never see or store your card details.
You may cancel at any time from your account, and your subscription runs to the end of the period you have paid for.
Your right to change your mind within 14 days. If you are buying as a consumer rather than for a business, you have 14 days from the day after you subscribe to cancel for any reason. Because access starts immediately, you are asking us to begin the service inside that period, so if you cancel within those 14 days we refund what you paid less a proportionate amount for the days you actually had access, rather than the whole fee. Tell us at our contact page or cancel from your account and say you are using this right.
The 14 days are the whole of the cooling-off period. After them, a subscription runs for the term you bought and is not refundable in part: if you cancel eight months into an annual subscription you keep access until it ends, and there is no refund for the months remaining. The exceptions are where the law requires one, or where the service has been unusable and we agree it has.
A monthly subscription may instead be paused for one, two or three months from your account. While it is paused nothing is charged and the full-text search is closed to you, and both start again on the resume date shown when you pause it. A pause takes effect immediately, so the remainder of the month already paid for is given up.
If a payment fails we keep your access running while the card is retried, until the period you have already paid for runs out.
What you may do with it
Use it for your own work, including your employer’s. Do not systematically copy, scrape or redistribute the catalogue, resell access, or share one login between several people. One subscription is one person; for several people in one organisation, ask us about a team. The data licence sets out what you may quote and cite, and the security statement lists who processes your data on our behalf.
Where we stand back
We provide the service as it is. We do not warrant that it is uninterrupted, error free, or that any particular document is present or accurate. Nothing here is legal, financial or professional advice.
Nothing in these terms limits liability for death or personal injury caused by negligence, for fraud, or for anything else that cannot lawfully be limited. Subject to that, our total liability to you is limited to the amount you paid us in the twelve months before the claim.
Ending it
You can close your account at any time. We may suspend or end an account that breaches these terms, and will say why. If we end your subscription without cause, we refund the unused part.
Law and questions
These terms are governed by the law of England and Wales, and the courts of England and Wales have exclusive jurisdiction. Questions to hello@publicpapers.co.uk.