Independence and funding

Who pays for this

The publisher pays for it. The Operative Sentence is published by Zane Hitchcox, an independent publisher, as a sole proprietorship, out of his own money. There is no other funder. The site earns nothing and is not intended to earn anything.

The costs are small and worth listing so that the claim is checkable in kind if not in amount: a domain registration, static hosting for a few hundred kilobytes of hand-written HTML, and two mailboxes. There are no freelancers, no contributed posts, no purchased content, no purchased links and no marketing spend. Every page here was researched and written by the publisher, and the time is unpaid.

There is no advertising inventory on this site, no sponsorship, no subscription, no paywall, no donation button, no grant, no institutional backer and no parent organisation. The publisher holds no financial interest in any manufacturer, distributor, waste contractor, group purchasing organisation or trade body in this field, and receives no compensation of any kind from any of them.

What this publication does not take

Each of the following is refused as a standing rule rather than declined case by case, so that there is no judgement call to make when an offer arrives.

• No advertising. No display units, no native units, no “presented by” slots, no directory listings, no sponsored badge on any page.
• No sponsorship. No page, section, register, diagram or table on this site is underwritten by anyone.
• No affiliate links. No link on this site earns a commission, a referral fee or a lead payment, and no outbound link is monetised in any form.
• No paid placement. No product, brand, service, consultant or vendor appears here because someone paid for it to appear, and none ever will.
• No guest posts and no contributed content. Nobody outside this publication writes for it. If that ever changes, the contributor is named on the page with who they work for.
• No link sales, no link exchanges, no paid links, incoming or outgoing. Outbound links here go to primary documents and to nothing else.
• No sponsored content of any kind, however labelled — advertorial, partner content, thought leadership, co-published research.
• No calls to action inside editorial copy. No “request a quote”, no “talk to a specialist”, no lead form, no gated download.
• No product recommendation, ranking or named-brand comparison of fluid-management systems, canisters, solidifiers or liners. This is an editorial rule as well as a commercial one, and it is set out at Editorial standards.
• No investor information, no statement about any company’s securities, and nothing on this site is an inducement to buy or sell anything.

No vendor sees copy before publication

We do not send draft copy to anyone outside this publication before it is published. Not to a manufacturer, a distributor, a waste contractor, a group purchasing organisation, a trade body, a professional association, a public relations agency, or anyone acting for any of them. There is no review window, no courtesy preview, no pre-publication fact-check offered to a party with a commercial interest in the answer, and no arrangement under which anyone gets to see a page early.

The first time anyone outside sees a page here is when you do. The only exception that could ever exist is a factual query put to an issuing body about its own document — asking an agency what a provision means, or a utility whether an ordinance has been amended — and if an answer from such a query is used on a page, the page says who was asked, what was asked, and on what date.

What anyone may do, at any time, is send us a document or tell us we are wrong. That is welcome from anybody, including from a manufacturer or a waste contractor, and it earns exactly the same treatment as any other correspondence: the document is checked against its issuer and cited if it holds up, and the correction is published under the policy at Editorial standards whether or not the sender wants credit. Sending us a document buys nothing. It cannot buy a mention, a link, a favourable framing or a preview.

Why the refusal is absolute rather than disclosed

Most reference publications in this field take money from the industry they cover and manage the conflict with a disclosure line. That is a legitimate model and it is not ours, for a reason specific to this subject.

The commercial question underneath surgical fluid waste is how much of a hospital’s waste stream is removed by the pound, and by whom. Nearly every organisation that publishes about it is paid by the pound, or sells the thing that changes the poundage. The web page a nurse finds when they search for what a regulation requires is, in most cases, written by a party with a direct financial stake in the answer — and the recurring failure of that literature is not dishonesty, it is a citation to nothing. In our assessment, an ad unit or a sponsored table on a publication whose entire proposition is “here is the sentence and here is where it came from” would cost more credibility than it could earn back. The only thing this publication can be worth is that it is citable. That asset is not compatible with a revenue line from anyone in the field.

The corollary is that this site is small, slow and dependent on one person’s unpaid time, and that is a real weakness rather than a virtue. It is written up honestly, with the rest of them, at How we work, and where this could be wrong.

If any of this ever changes, it will be named with its mechanism

A funding statement is only worth anything if it says in advance what a change would look like. So: any commercial relationship this publication ever has will be named, in specifics, with the mechanism by which money moves. That means all of the following, not a general acknowledgement of support.

• Who paid — the legal name of the paying party, and the parent company if it has one.
• What form the payment took — advertising, sponsorship, a grant, a commission, a fee for work done elsewhere, a free or discounted service, a licence, or anything else of value.
• How much, as an amount or as a share of the publication’s total costs for the year.
• What it bought and what it did not — stated explicitly, including that it did not buy copy review, editorial input, a link, a mention or advance sight of any page.
• Which pages it touches, with the disclosure repeated on each of those pages rather than only here.
• The date it started, and the date it ended.

Every such change is a dated entry at Change log and a revision to this page with a version bump. It is never a quiet edit, and this page keeps its history: if the answer to “who pays for this” ever stops being “the publisher”, the old answer stays visible with the date it stopped being true.

The same rule covers the publisher personally. If he ever acquires a financial interest in any manufacturer, distributor, waste contractor or trade body in this field, or takes paid work from one, it is disclosed here and in the disclosure line of every affected page before the next thing is published — and the standing disclosure line printed on every page, which currently reads that there is no such relationship, is corrected rather than left standing.

Reuse, and what we ask for instead of money

Our own prose, tables and diagrams are published under CC BY 4.0, so a hospital educator can lift a table into a unit in-service, a policy writer can paste a citation into a procedure, and nobody has to ask. Quoted United States government text is in the public domain; third-party quotations remain their authors’. The terms and the ready-made citation strings are at How to cite and reuse.

What is useful to send instead of money: a document we could not obtain, a citation we got wrong, a state rule we have published as unread, an ordinance from a treatment authority we have not covered, or a copy of something that has gone offline. Those go to corrections@biodrainmedical.com or editor@biodrainmedical.com, and they are worth more to this publication than any of the things it refuses.