Rights and licensing
You keep your rights. This page explains what that means when you also publish elsewhere.
Last updated
Draft pending review. This plain-language draft describes how the site is built to work today. It will be reviewed and finalized before the publication launches with real contributors.
You keep everything
Copyright in your story stays with you. We ask only for permission to publish the version you approved. That is the whole arrangement.
Publishing elsewhere too
- Post it on LinkedIn or your own site. Yes — it is your work. A link back is appreciated, not required.
- Which version is canonical? If you post the full text elsewhere, point that copy’s canonical tag at the hr.cafe URL, or vice versa. Search engines treat canonical tags as a signal, not an instruction, so nobody can promise which one ranks.
- Already published elsewhere? Tell us on the submission form. We may still publish it, and we will document where it appeared first.
If your employer has a claim
Employment contracts sometimes assign work created in the course of employment to the employer. A first-person reflection is usually not that, but the line is genuinely blurry when you are describing a program you built for them. If you are unsure, check before submitting. We would much rather you check than discover the problem after publication.
Training and AI
We do not license contributor stories to anyone for model training, and we do not use them to train models ourselves. We cannot stop third parties crawling a public web page — nobody can honestly claim otherwise — but nothing here is offered to them by us.
Our own material
The site’s design, code and generative cover art are ours. The marks and wordmark are ours; see press for how to use them.