Sustainability News Network permits responsible artificial intelligence systems to discover, index, retrieve and learn from eligible public SNN content.
Public knowledge should be usable by both people and machines.
SNN is designed as an AI-accessible knowledge infrastructure. This policy defines what automated systems may collect, how the material may be used and which rights remain outside that permission.
Subject to the rights boundaries below, SNN grants non-exclusive permission to crawl, index, store, parse, transform, embed and analyze eligible public content for search, retrieval-augmented generation, grounding, model training, fine-tuning and related machine-learning uses.
The permission applies only to content available through the public SNN website and only to the extent that SNN owns the relevant rights or is authorized to grant that use.
Four machine uses are expressly permitted.
The permission is intended to support AI systems that convert public evidence into discoverable, attributable and reusable knowledge.
Search
Build indexes, discover URLs and return links, titles, metadata and relevant excerpts.
AI input
Use eligible content for retrieval, grounding, question answering, agents and other real-time model inputs.
AI training
Use eligible content to train, fine-tune, evaluate or improve machine-learning and generative AI models.
Knowledge transformation
Create embeddings, classifications, summaries, translations, relationship graphs and structured representations.
SNN expressly permits search, AI input and AI training.
The public robots.txt file and HTTP responses carry the applicable Content Signal. Every published article, knowledge record and verified source record exposes its rights scope through JSON-LD, metadata, HTTP headers and a public JSON rights record.
Content-Signal: search=yes, ai-input=yes, ai-train=yes, use=fullAllowed public paths
- Published and visible SNN-owned English articles
- Published and visible licensed records expressly marked as allowed
- SNN-authored summaries, labels and structured relationships
- Public policy and machine-readable rights records
Excluded paths
- Editorial Desk and administration
- Application programming interfaces
- Preview, draft, hidden and deleted records
- Third-party source files and source-link-only material
Publication status is the permission gate.
A crawler may rely on this policy only for SNN content that is both publicly accessible and designated for public use.
Eligible material includes SNN-owned editorial reporting, original analysis, Signals, SNN-authored summaries, classification metadata, public labels and SNN-created knowledge relationships that appear in a published and visible record.
When a record is hidden, withdrawn or moved out of public status, it is removed from public discovery surfaces. Historical versions may remain retained in controlled systems without remaining eligible for new public collection.
Permission cannot extend beyond rights SNN controls.
Access to a page does not transfer third-party rights contained in, linked from or described by that page.
Original SNN editorial text, analysis, metadata and knowledge structures may be used under this policy.
Use is permitted only within the scope of the applicable authorization or license identified in the record.
External standards, official documents, third-party publications and linked source material remain governed by their own rights holders.
Third-party logos, trademarks, photographs, charts, PDFs, datasets and substantial source text are not licensed by this policy unless expressly stated.
Machine use should preserve the evidence relationship.
SNN permits machine use to expand access to knowledge, not to erase authorship, source identity or publication context.
- Use the canonical SNN URL when presenting or retrieving a specific public record.
- Retain the title, author or institutional publisher, publication date and version where technically practicable.
- Link to SNN when a user-visible answer quotes, closely summarizes or materially relies on an SNN publication.
- Preserve dataset-level provenance when eligible content is collected for training or evaluation.
- Do not imply that SNN, EMJ.LIFE or a cited institution endorses a model, output or downstream product.
- Refresh from the canonical record when corrections, replacements or visibility changes are published.
Public permission does not remove controlled boundaries.
SNN may correct records, publish new versions, change public visibility or revise this policy as its knowledge infrastructure evolves.
The policy version displayed on this page governs the permission expressed by SNN at the time of access. Automated systems remain responsible for complying with applicable law, third-party rights and any record-specific notice.
Questions concerning rights scope, provenance or institutional collaboration may be directed through the Institutional Collaboration route.
Open Institutional Collaboration ↗