Terms of use

Last updated 27 July 2026. Material changes to this page are dated.

These terms govern your use of thevalueforge.org. By using the site you accept them. If you do not, please stop using it.

They sit alongside the Legal page, which sets out what this publication is and is not, the limits of what it promises, and the licence on its content. Where this page and that one address the same subject, read them together; neither narrows the other.

What you may do with the content

Generously, and without asking. The written content is published under CC BY 4.0, so you may copy it, quote it, republish it, translate it, teach from it, and build on it — including commercially — provided you attribute The Value Forge with a link to the source page and indicate where you have changed it.

That permission is real and deliberate. This publication exists so the synthesis is available to everyone; it is not-for-profit, generates no income, and has nothing to sell.

What you may not do

Four things, and each exists for a reason rather than out of caution.

Do not present this publication’s evidence as more settled than it is. Findings carry labels — Provisional, Contested, Confirmed — and those labels are part of the claim, not decoration around it. If you reuse a finding, carry its label and its caveats with it, or state plainly that you have changed them. Stripping a caveat and republishing the result is not adaptation; it is misrepresentation, and it is the single misuse this publication most wants to prevent.

Do not use the name or identity. “The Value Forge”, its wordmark, and its visual identity are not covered by the content licence. Do not use them to brand, endorse, or lend authority to anything else, and do not present your work as this publication’s, as approved by it, or as produced with its involvement.

Do not present the content as clinical advice. It is not, it never becomes so by being republished, and you must not put it in front of a reader as if it were. See Not medical or professional advice.

Do not interfere with the site. No attempts to disrupt, overload, gain unauthorised access to, or introduce malicious code into the site or the infrastructure it runs on.

Availability, and the alpha

The site is offered as it is and as available. There is no uptime commitment. Content may be revised, relabelled, superseded, or withdrawn as the evidence changes — that is a feature of an evidence publication, not a defect in it, and material corrections are recorded publicly in the corrections record.

This publication is in alpha. It says so because it is true: the method is young, the pattern register is short, and the work is being built in the open rather than presented as finished.

The email edition

Subscribing is optional; the site is fully usable without it, and nothing is gated behind an address. You provide an email address, it is used to send you this publication and nothing else, and it is never sold, rented, or shared for anyone else’s marketing.

Emails are sent using MailerLite, which stores and sends on this publication’s behalf as its data processor. That arrangement covers what MailerLite does; it does not move any responsibility away from this publication, which remains the data controller and answers requests about your data itself.

Unsubscribing and erasure are different, and you can ask for either. Every email carries an unsubscribe link that works immediately and stops us sending. Erasure goes further and deletes your record; ask through the feedback route. See Privacy.

Feedback you send us

Feedback goes through a Google Form and is genuinely wanted, including the uncomfortable kind.

You cannot identify yourself through the form, and we would rather you didn’t. There is no account, no registration, and no email field — the form asks for nothing that identifies a person, by design. It follows that we hold no personal data from it, and that there is nothing arising from it to request, correct, or erase.

We do not reply, and sending feedback does not oblige us to act on it. There is no correspondence behind the form. Submissions are collected and reviewed, in part by automated means. What you send may change what gets published, may change nothing at all, and may not be read individually. No timescale attaches to any of it.

Set your expectations low, and we would rather say so than imply a dialogue this publication cannot staff. There is one editor, the production process is largely automated, and an open promise to answer everyone is a promise that would be broken.

The response, where there is one, is published rather than sent. Stated on the feedback page and repeated here as a term: where something you send changes what we do, we may publish the theme of what was said and what we did about it, aggregated and anonymised. Most submissions will not appear. We never publish your identity or any identifying detail. If you would rather your point were not published even in that form, say so in the submission and it will not be.

Please do not send confidential, patient-identifiable, or commercially sensitive material. This publication does not want it, has no lawful basis to hold it, and will delete it if it arrives.

Challenging what we publish

If you think something here is wrong, tell us. The route is open to anyone, without conditions, and a challenge to a published claim is treated as a correction rather than a complaint — nobody has to justify raising one.

Where we are satisfied a published claim is factually wrong, we correct it and say so in the open, dated, at Corrections. That is the remedy this publication offers, and it is the one thing here we do hold ourselves to, because a publication that will not correct itself is not worth reading.

The limits on it are real, and stated rather than discovered: we judge whether a challenge is substantiated, and evidence weighed against evidence will sometimes go against you. There is no timescale, no appeal, no undertaking to reply to you, and disagreement with an interpretation is not the same as an error of fact. A challenge that does not result in a correction may receive no response at all.

Liability

Set out in full on the Legal page and not restated here, so that the two cannot drift apart. In short: content is provided without warranty, and liability is excluded to the fullest extent the law permits — which does not exclude anything that cannot lawfully be excluded.

Changes to these terms

These terms may change as the publication develops. The version in force is the one published here, and the date at the top of this page tells you when it last changed materially. Continuing to use the site after a change means accepting the current version.

General

If any part of these terms is found unenforceable, the rest continues to apply. A failure to enforce a term is not a waiver of it.

These terms and any dispute arising from use of this site are governed by the law of England and Wales, and the courts of England and Wales have exclusive jurisdiction.

Who publishes this

The Value Forge is an independent, not-for-profit publication produced by an individual editor in a personal capacity. It is not a company, a charity, or an NHS body, and it has no registration number to quote, because there is no entity to register. It is not affiliated with, endorsed by, or produced on behalf of any NHS organisation, and it takes no funding from anyone.

The editor publishes anonymously at present; why, and what accountability rests on instead, is set out under How this publication is produced.

Contact

Questions about these terms, requests concerning reuse, and challenges to published findings all go through the feedback route.