Transparency
Terms of use
The conditions on which this site is made available, what you may do with its material, and the limits of what the publisher undertakes.
Acceptance and scope
Using this website means accepting these terms. They apply to all pages on this domain and to the material published on them. They do not apply to any external site reached from here, and they do not create any relationship of professional advice, engagement or representation between you and the publisher.
If you do not accept these terms, please do not use the site. The publisher may revise the terms; the current version is the one published here, and the review date is shown at the foot of the page.
Nature of the material
This site is an independent, open-access editorial reference. It is not accredited by any authority, it awards no qualification, diploma or certificate, and it runs no courses, examinations or individual tuition. Reading the material confers no professional status of any kind.
The material is general information about method and practice. It is not legal advice, not data-protection advice, not professional advice about any specific situation, and not an assessment of any project, tool, organisation or person. Access rights, media law, copyright and data-protection duties vary between jurisdictions and change over time: for any concrete question, the rules in force and a qualified professional govern.
Permitted use
You may read the pages, print them for personal or internal use, and quote short extracts for reporting, teaching, study, criticism or review, provided you name the page title, this site and the date consulted, and do not alter the sense of what you quote.
Reproducing a page in full, publishing substantial parts elsewhere, incorporating the material into a commercial product or training corpus, or presenting it as your own or as endorsed by the publisher requires written permission, which can be requested through the contact page.
What you must not do
Checklist
- Present the material as accredited teaching or as conferring a qualification.
- State or imply that the publisher endorses a person, organisation, tool or service.
- Alter quoted text so that its meaning changes.
- Attempt to interfere with the availability, integrity or security of the site.
- Use the material as a substitute for legal or professional advice in a real matter.
Attribution in practice
An attribution is useful when a reader of your work can reach the same page and see the same wording. Four elements achieve that, and a fifth is worth adding where a figure is involved.
Checklist
- The title of the specific page, not only the name of the site.
- The name of the site as publisher.
- The date on which you consulted it, since pages are revised.
- The review date shown at the foot of the page, where a description of a rule is being quoted.
- For a quoted figure, the source named beside it here rather than this site alone.
Automated access, crawling and reuse in systems
The site's robots file admits general search crawlers and the crawlers operated by answer and assistant systems, because the material is published to be found and a reference that cannot be indexed is of little use to the people looking for it. Reading, indexing and quoting with attribution therefore need no permission.
That permission does not extend to reproduction. Republishing whole pages or substantial parts, redistributing the material as a product or dataset, or incorporating it into a training corpus is reproduction rather than reading, and requires written permission under the section above. Where such material is presented to an end reader, it should identify this site as the source and should not be shown as endorsed by, or produced in cooperation with, the publisher.
No accounts, no submissions, no user content
There is no registration, no login, no comment facility, no upload and no forum, so nothing you write is published on the site and no user content exists to moderate. The single interactive route is the enquiry form on the contact page, which sends a message to the publisher and displays nothing publicly.
Correspondence sent to the publisher is treated as private and used to answer the enquiry, as described in the data protection notice. Please do not send confidential documents, credentials, health information or anything that could identify a protected source: neither the form nor ordinary electronic mail is a secure channel, and this project is not equipped to receive material requiring protection.
Third-party rights and references
Names of organisations, institutions, publications, tools and standards appear for identification and description only. Their use implies no affiliation with, endorsement by or approval from the parties named, and any trade marks remain the property of their owners.
Where a page refers to legislation, official guidance, a statistical series or a public register, the cited instrument or publisher is the authoritative source and prevails over any description here. Descriptions reflect the source as consulted on the date recorded and may have been superseded since.
External links
Where a page names an external body or document, the reference is descriptive; this site does not embed third-party content and does not load anything from another domain. The publisher does not control any external resource, does not endorse its content and accepts no responsibility for it, and following any external reference is at your own discretion and subject to that party's own terms.
Availability and changes
The site is provided as it stands and as available. No uninterrupted availability is promised: pages may be temporarily unreachable for maintenance or for reasons outside the publisher's control, and material may be revised, corrected or withdrawn at any time.
Where a page is withdrawn because it can no longer be maintained accurately, the withdrawal is recorded on the index of pages rather than left as a silent gap. Substantive revisions are noted at the foot of the page concerned.
Disclaimer and limitation of liability
The material is published in good faith and prepared with the procedure described on the protocol page, but no warranty is given that it is complete, current or fit for any particular purpose. Any reliance you place on it is at your own risk, and decisions in a real matter should be taken on the applicable rules in force with qualified advice.
To the extent permitted by law, the publisher accepts no liability for loss or damage arising from use of, or inability to use, this site or its material, including any consequence of a decision taken in reliance on it. Nothing in these terms excludes or limits liability where the law does not permit exclusion or limitation.
Applicable law
These terms are governed by the law of Ireland, and the courts of Ireland have jurisdiction over any dispute arising from them or from use of this site. Where you use the site as a consumer resident elsewhere in the European Union, this does not deprive you of the protection of any mandatory provision of the law of your place of residence.
If a provision of these terms is found unenforceable, the remaining provisions continue to apply. Questions about these terms, including permission requests, can be sent through the contact page.