Rights & licensing

An author warrants that the work offered is their own, that it does not infringe another's rights, and that they hold the permissions for any third-party material — images, scans, long quotations — reproduced in it. The lodge cannot publish material whose rights are unclear, and it relies on the author's good-faith attestation, made at submission.

The lodge's proposed position is that the author retains copyright in their work, granting the lodge a non-exclusive, perpetual licence to publish it in the Transactions and to preserve and make it available through the archive. This keeps the work the author's while letting the lodge keep the record.

These terms are proposed, not ratified. Until the lodge rules, no real document is published under them; the public catalogue is shown in disclosed-specimen mode for that reason.

Reproducing an image, a manuscript page, or an artefact often needs the permission of whoever holds it — a member, an estate, a library, or the Grand Lodge. The author secures that permission and supplies its terms; the lodge records them with the item. Where a permission is limited (for member access only, say, or without redistribution), the lodge honours the limit.

Not everything the lodge holds is public. Some material is open to all; some opens only as a reader's standing is recorded; some is reserved by the terms under which it was given. Access is decided per item and enforced by the archive, not left to chance. The catalogue's open holdings are freely readable; the rest is described honestly in the open and opened to those entitled to it.

Materials created by the lodge itself — its minutes, its Transactions, its own photographs — are held by the lodge, and reproduced from it by permission. Where the lodge holds something on deposit from another, it reproduces it only on that depositor's terms.

If you hold a right in something published here, or believe something is published in error, write to the lodge: the item will be reviewed promptly and, where the claim is sound, corrected or withdrawn. The lodge also withholds genuinely private or sensitive material — living individuals' personal data, anything reserved to the lodge room — as a matter of course, and a request to review such a case is always heard.