What you may do with this, and the one thing you may not.

The short version

Four things are published here and each carries its own terms. The writing and the figures: quote, cite, argue with, teach from, attribute the publication and link to the page, do not republish in full. The framework as data: reuse it freely under CC BY 4.0, with attribution. The method's records and blank forms: use, complete and adapt them for your own organisation's internal work, and do not republish or rebrand them. The code and the tools: all rights reserved, visible does not mean licensed.

Quoting and citing

You may quote extracts in reports, papers, presentations, teaching material, articles and posts, including commercial ones, provided the quotation is attributed to Projects Advisors and, where the medium allows a link, links to the page it came from.

There is no word limit stated here because a limit invites arithmetic rather than judgement. The test is whether somebody reading your quotation still has a reason to read the original. Where they would not, you have reproduced the article rather than quoted it.

Ideas, method and the framework

Ideas are not owned and this site does not pretend otherwise. Where an article describes what a published standard requires, that requirement belongs to the standard and its publisher, not to us. Use it freely.

The assurance framework is a different case, and worth being precise about. Every domain in it is traceable to a published source and those sources belong to their own bodies. What is ours is the arrangement: which domains exist, how they are grouped across the four lifecycle stages, the question each one settles, and the tests written under it. You are welcome to use that arrangement in your own work and to build on it. You may not publish it as your own.

The framework as data

The framework is also published in machine-readable form: in the structured data embedded in the framework pages, and as a single file at framework.json, which carries its own licence block and an attribution line written out ready to paste. That data, meaning the domains, their questions, tests and the citations attached to them, is licensed under the Creative Commons Attribution 4.0 International licence. You may copy, redistribute, adapt and build on it, including commercially, provided you attribute Projects Advisors, link to the licence, and say if you changed it. Attribution is to the publication and its address.

The licence covers the data. It does not cover the prose of the framework pages, which stays under the terms above, and it does not cover the tools that read the data, which are covered below. The distinction is deliberate: the arrangement is more useful to everybody as an open reference, and open data is what other systems can cite.

The method's records and blank forms

The asset lifecycle method publishes its records as blank forms, to print and as a spreadsheet, alongside a worked example of them in use. You may use, complete and adapt the records and the blank forms for your own organisation's internal work.

What you enter is yours. The data you put into a record, and every completed entry, belongs to you or to your organisation. This site does not receive or record entries: the forms are completed on paper or in your own copy of the file, and nothing written in them is sent here.

The publication's own material stays its own. The blank templates, the wording published with them, their visual design, the branding and the code that produces them may not be republished, rebranded, resold, redistributed or hosted as another party's product without permission. A completed record kept in your organisation's files is not republication; the blank set offered to others under another name is.

Code and tools

The site's source code, and the diagnostic tools that run in your browser, are proprietary. All rights are reserved. The code that runs a tool is delivered to your browser to run there, and is therefore visible to anyone who looks; visibility is not a licence. You may use the tools, print their results and act on them. You may not copy, adapt, host or redistribute the code, or present the tool itself as your own.

What a tool computes for you is yours. Nothing you enter is sent anywhere, and the result exists only on your screen and in what you choose to print.

Diagrams

The figures are original, drawn as inline code rather than image files, and they are the easiest thing on the site to take. You may reproduce them with attribution and a link, unaltered. If you need a version adapted to your own material, ask, and the answer will usually be yes.

Machines and models

This site is open to automated readers on purpose. Crawlers are admitted explicitly and there is a plain-text summary at llms.txt written for them. Reading, indexing, summarising and answering questions from this material are all intended uses.

What is asked in return is attribution. Where a system draws on this work in an answer, name the publication and cite the page. The same test applies as for a human quotation: reproducing an article in full, in place of it, is not a summary.

Copyright and citation

Projects Advisors is the author of the original text and figures. Copyright subsists in them from the moment they are written, and the material is published and licensed under that name.

The correct citation is to Projects Advisors and the page.

Asking

For anything beyond the above, including republication in full, translation, or inclusion in a product, please get in touch. Requests are read and most are agreed.

Related

Terms of use covers what this publication is, what it is not, and the limits of relying on it. Privacy covers what happens to data.