Research and Contribution Policy
Effective date: July 28, 2026
The Short Version
Gluten Free Brewer wants researchers, maltsters, brewers, educators, suppliers, technical specialists, and experienced practitioners to help improve the public knowledge base.
You keep ownership of your original work. Sending something to us does not secretly transfer it.
If we accept your original contribution for publication, you give Gluten Free Brewer permission to edit, publish, maintain, archive, and distribute it as part of the project. Unless we agree otherwise in writing before publication, the published contribution will be available to the public under Creative Commons Attribution 4.0 International (CC BY 4.0).
You should receive appropriate credit for a substantial, identifiable contribution. You remain free to use and publish your own work elsewhere.
Contributing public knowledge does not provide access to, ownership of, or rights in the private Knowledge Foundry system.
What We Welcome
Useful contributions may include:
- corrections and clarifications
- peer review and technical criticism
- research papers and source leads
- original datasets that may lawfully be shared
- brewing and malting protocols
- laboratory observations and analytical results
- cultivar, ingredient, enzyme, process, or equipment information
- field experience and documented production lessons
- historical records that may lawfully be published
- charts, diagrams, photographs, and illustrations
- translations and accessibility improvements
- proposals for new pages or revisions to existing pages
A contribution does not need to agree with an existing page. Good evidence, clear disagreement, failed experiments, and negative results can all improve the knowledge base.
General Feedback Is Not an Ownership Transfer
Sending a question, correction, citation, suggestion, comment, or research lead does not transfer ownership to Gluten Free Brewer or ImpySoft.
Gluten Free Brewer may review, verify, respond to, decline, or independently act on general feedback. General ideas, facts, and suggestions may not be protectable intellectual property by themselves.
Ownership of Original Contributions
Contributors retain ownership of original material they submit unless a separate signed agreement expressly transfers ownership.
A contributor may continue to:
- publish the original work elsewhere
- use it in later research, teaching, consulting, books, articles, software, or commercial projects
- license it to other people
- expand, revise, or replace the contributor's own version
Gluten Free Brewer does not require exclusivity unless the contributor and Gluten Free Brewer expressly agree to it in a separate signed agreement.
Permission Granted for Accepted Contributions
When a contributor submits original material for possible publication and Gluten Free Brewer accepts it for publication, the contributor grants Gluten Free Brewer, LLC a nonexclusive, worldwide, perpetual, royalty-free license to:
- review and fact-check the contribution
- edit it for accuracy, clarity, structure, tone, formatting, safety, citations, and consistency
- reproduce, publish, display, and distribute it
- combine it with other material
- translate or adapt it
- maintain, update, correct, archive, and preserve it
- use it in the public Gluten Free Brewer knowledge product and related educational formats
This permission allows Gluten Free Brewer to keep the knowledge base useful over time without taking ownership away from the contributor.
Public License After Publication
Unless a different written arrangement is made before publication, original accepted contribution material intentionally published as part of the public Gluten Free Brewer knowledge base will be made available under the Creative Commons Attribution 4.0 International license.
CC BY 4.0 allows the public to share and adapt the published material, including commercially, provided that the license's attribution and change-notice requirements are followed.
Once material has been validly released under CC BY 4.0, that public license cannot be withdrawn from copies already distributed under its terms.
A contributor who does not want a proposed contribution released under CC BY 4.0 must say so before publication so another written arrangement can be considered.
Attribution and Credit
Gluten Free Brewer should provide appropriate attribution for substantial, identifiable contributions.
Attribution may include:
- the contributor's name
- institutional or company affiliation
- professional credentials when relevant
- a citation to an original paper, dataset, report, or publication
- a contributor note, acknowledgment, or page credit
The contributor may request a reasonable attribution name or citation format before publication.
Minor corrections, general feedback, source leads, anonymous review, routine editing, and contributions that cannot be clearly separated from broader collaborative work may be acknowledged collectively or may not receive an individual byline.
Attribution does not imply that the contributor endorses every statement on the page, later revisions, the entire site, or any commercial activity of Gluten Free Brewer.
Contributor Responsibilities
By submitting material for possible publication, the contributor represents to the best of the contributor's knowledge that:
- the contributor has the right to submit it
- the contribution is original or properly identifies material owned by others
- known copyright, license, confidentiality, embargo, contractual, employment, or publication restrictions have been disclosed
- human-subject, personal, regulated, or sensitive information has not been improperly included
- the contribution is not knowingly false, fabricated, deceptive, defamatory, or unlawfully obtained
- the contributor has identified material that should not be published publicly
Do not send a publisher's PDF, paid database content, confidential employer material, restricted laboratory records, or another person's unpublished work unless you have the right to provide it for the proposed use.
Third-Party Material
Submitting a paper, image, chart, dataset, quotation, software component, or other third-party material does not give Gluten Free Brewer ownership of it or the right to relicense it.
Third-party material remains subject to its original copyright, license, attribution, contractual, privacy, and other restrictions.
Gluten Free Brewer may:
- cite or link to a source instead of republishing it
- use only a limited quotation or permitted excerpt
- request proof of permission
- replace the item with an original description or illustration
- decline to use the item
The public CC BY 4.0 license applies only to original material that Gluten Free Brewer and the contributor have the right to license.
Confidential, Embargoed, and Unpublished Material
Do not send confidential, proprietary, embargoed, regulated, or personally sensitive material through ordinary contact channels.
Material clearly submitted as confidential or unpublished will not be intentionally published without the contributor's permission or another valid legal basis.
For sensitive material, Gluten Free Brewer may require:
- a separate written agreement
- a defined review purpose
- secure transfer and storage
- access limitations
- an agreed publication or embargo date
- redaction or anonymization
Gluten Free Brewer may decline to accept sensitive material when an appropriate process is not available.
The public-content license does not automatically apply to private correspondence, drafts, review notes, confidential submissions, unpublished datasets, source archives, or internal evaluation records.
Editorial and Governance Review
Submission does not guarantee publication.
Gluten Free Brewer may review a proposed contribution for:
- evidence quality and source reliability
- technical accuracy
- relevance to gluten-free brewing or related fields
- safety and practical risk
- clarity and reproducibility
- conflicts with stronger evidence
- third-party rights and privacy concerns
- consistency with the site's scope and editorial standards
Gluten Free Brewer may edit, combine, delay, decline, correct, update, archive, or remove material as needed to maintain the quality and integrity of the knowledge base.
Material may be revised after publication as evidence, methods, products, regulations, or practical experience change. Where appropriate, meaningful contributor credit and source citations should be preserved through later revisions.
Corrections, Withdrawal Requests, and Disputes
Contributors may request correction of attribution, factual errors, or inaccurate descriptions of their work.
A contributor may ask Gluten Free Brewer to stop displaying a contribution. Gluten Free Brewer will consider the request in good faith, particularly for safety, privacy, legal, or serious accuracy concerns.
Removal from the site does not revoke CC BY 4.0 rights already validly granted to the public for material previously published under that license, and it may not remove archived, cited, or independently distributed copies.
Ownership, attribution, or publication disputes should be submitted through the Contact page with enough detail to identify the material and the claimed issue.
No Rights in the Knowledge Foundry
The public knowledge product and the private system that produces and governs it are separate.
A contribution, review, collaboration, demonstration, or exchange of feedback does not grant the contributor any ownership of, license to, or access rights in:
- the Knowledge Foundry
- Prospector
- private prompts or agent instructions
- governance systems or constitutional rules
- internal workflows and orchestration
- evaluation methods and private review records
- source code, automation, schemas, or platform architecture
- unpublished internal implementation materials
Those private platform materials remain proprietary to ImpySoft, LLC unless a separate written agreement expressly states otherwise.
Likewise, contributing through a Foundry-supported process does not transfer the contributor's original submission to ImpySoft. The contributor relationship for public GFB content is with Gluten Free Brewer, LLC unless another agreement says otherwise.
No Employment, Partnership, or Professional Relationship
A contribution does not by itself create employment, a contractor relationship, partnership, joint venture, fiduciary duty, consulting engagement, research sponsorship, or promise of payment.
Compensated, commissioned, exclusive, confidential, software-development, or institutionally sponsored work should be governed by a separate written agreement.
Contact and Submission
Use the Contact page to propose a contribution or ask how to submit material.
Before sending a large dataset, archive, confidential record, unpublished manuscript, or other sensitive collection, contact Gluten Free Brewer first so the parties can agree on an appropriate process.