In general, you are welcome to post any information that you believe will be of interest to other users of the site.
To maintain and protect the quality of information posted, the rights of other site users, the atmosphere of trust necessary for the effective operation of the site and the protections due to investors, all users are asked to:
- Focus their contributions on sustainable business and SRI
- Commit to publishing in good faith
Focus contributions on sustainable business and SRI
Material you post on the site should be directed principally towards furthering the SRI community’s understanding of sustainable business and SRI. Such material is likely to include research reports, academic papers, news and articles from the internet and opinion pieces.
Types of sustainability information
We encourage users to publish:
- Sustainability context information for investment decision-making – sustainability information that can be readily combined with financial research and can therefore contribute towards investment analysis and decision-making – we actively encourage this
- Industry context information – contextual information that helps site users to understand better the structure and drivers of different sectors, industries and companies
We discourage publication of:
- Pure sustainability information – information about environmental, social or economic issues that does not have any direct applicability to investment decision-making
We explicitly forbid publication of:
- Investment recommendations - see the Investment Compliance section below
- Campaigning or lobbying material – see below
- Excessive advertising – see below
Publishing in good faith
You must post in good faith – that is to say, you should ensure that:
- information provided is accurate, up-to-date and not misleading;
- opinions stated are genuine (unless posting on the SRI-conoclast blog where ‘devil’s advocacy’ is actively encouraged)
- material vested interests are declared, and that
- publication does not violate the purpose and spirit of SRI-CONNECT and its community of users.
You should also acknowledge that you will not publish information for the sole (or majority) purpose of marketing or advertising your own products and/or services.
Prohibitions
You must not post content that:
- is illegal, obscene, defamatory, threatening, infringing of intellectual property rights, invasive of privacy or otherwise injurious or objectionable;
- may be injurious or detrimental to your person or to your professional or social status.
- is material and misleading false information, submitted knowingly or with intent to defraud
- is in contravention of any industry compliance rules
- constitutes excessive advertising (see below)
- is repetitive (see below)
- constitutes campaigning material (see below)
SRI-CONNECT reserves the right to remove any content that we, at our sole discretion, consider fits the descriptions above.
Whilst SRI-CONNECT does not pre-screen or regularly review posted Content, we do reserve the right to remove at our sole discretion any Content found to fit the descriptions above or to be in violation of these Conditions of Use in any other way.
SRI-CONNECT disclaims any responsibility for Users' misuse or misappropriation of Content or information posted on the SRI-CONNECT website.
No excessive advertising
Posters are welcome to use the site to present research that is available for purchase (as well as for free) off the site. They are also welcome to use the site to make their clients aware of research that they have published.
They should not, however, post ‘excessive advertising’. A post shall be considered ‘excessive advertising’ if:
- The body of the post does not contain any research content
- The post references a report or event that is not readily available to a sizeable number of users for free or upon payment of a reasonable sum
No campaigning
You should not post material whose sole (or majority) purpose is to campaign for a change in the environmental or social policy or practice of another organisation
SRI-CONNECT is an investment research tool and not a campaigning tool. While we recognise that the line between awareness-raising and advocacy may be blurred, we ask users to respect this line and to avoid active campaigning.
In particular, we believe that campaigns against particular companies and action that seeks public or media attention crosses this line and breaks the spirit of trust necessary for the site to function.
We exclude from the definition of ‘campaigning’, collaboration between investors to improve the efficiency and quality of their private engagement with companies.
