Contributors' charter

In a rapidly-changing digital world, publishing is changing. For that reason, we want to be clear about what we expect from our contributors. This is to protect everyone, and to underpin brilliant, trustworthy journalism.

If you’ve been commissioned to write a piece for Index on Censorship, we expect you to work within the following guidelines:

Be ready to speak with us

Before we commission you for the first time, we may book in a video call. This forms part of our standard practice, and we see it as essential in the age of AI. And actually, we like getting to know our contributors.

Stories must be written by humans

We do not accept articles that are substantially written by AI. We know that many people use AI tools to support their work, and we’re not expecting you to eradicate AI from your workflow entirely, but the piece must be written by you. Spellcheckers, transcription software and search engines are perfectly acceptable when used responsibly, and you can use translation software for words, phrases or research, for example.

We would rather see an article in your own wording, even if your English is imperfect, than an AI-written, -edited or -translated version. AI tools can sometimes impact the tone so much that the human quality is lost. It can also get things wrong.

If you would like to use other AI tools not mentioned above in your work for Index, the most important thing is transparency. Talk to us about it before starting your work.

If you write much better in another language, please talk to us about the possibility of this, as it may be better for us to hire a translator.

Interviews must be original

Desk-based research is important too, but if you quote from something previously published, you must be transparent about it. You can show us where you found your information with web links or comments.

All the interviews in the piece must be conducted by you, and you must discuss it with us first if any interviewees need a pseudonym. We appreciate that some people need the promise of anonymity before they are able to share their story, but we need to balance this with our ability to fact-check.

We may need evidence to verify sources

We might ask you to provide details of how you conducted your interviews.

Please keep audio files or written notes of your interviews safe, as we may ask to hear/see them if we need to check anything. This is not to undermine your work as a journalist, but to support our fact-checking work.

If this is going to be difficult for any reason, please discuss this with us before you start your work.

If we discover that you have invented interviews or used AI to write substantial parts of your work, we reserve the right not to pay you for your work and not to use you in the future. 

If you have any questions about this charter, or foresee any issues, please speak to your commissioning editor. We are more than happy to discuss anything.