A reader cannot tell an advertisement from an article by reading more carefully. If a publication about healthcare mixes paid material into editorial pages, the reader's only defence is trust in the publisher, and trust is not a control. This policy removes the question rather than managing it.
What this publication carries today
GMedAC Journal carries no advertising. No display units, no sponsored articles, no advertorial, no affiliate links, no referral commission, no paid placement in any list, feed or search result, and no paid inclusion of a source, a product, a clinic or a professional. No article here has been paid for, in money or in kind, by anybody whose interest it describes.
It also ships no advertising pixel, no conversion tag, no retargeting script, no behavioural tracker, no fingerprinting library and no third-party analytics. Not "none that identify the reader" — none at all.
What enforces this, and how far it reaches
A policy stating what an organisation intends is satisfied by intending it. Two things here go further than intent, and they are not equally strong.
The weaker one is a lint rule. It names the advertising, tag-manager, analytics and session-replay packages and refuses an import of one, and lint runs ahead of the build in this repository's verification command, so adding a named SDK is a failing run that names the rule rather than a pull request somebody waves through while tired. It is a deny list, and it stops what is on the list. A package nobody thought to name, or a tracker written by hand rather than installed, passes it; what stops those is review.
The stronger one is structural, and it removes the surface those SDKs need. This site is
exported as static files, so the framework refuses cookies(), headers(), searchParams and
middleware at build time. There is no code here that could set an identifier and no
request-time hook where one could be attached. Article bodies are Markdown rendered through
remark/rehype with rehype-sanitize rather than MDX, so an article cannot execute JavaScript
and cannot carry a tracker into a page as content. Reader search runs in the browser against a
static JSON index: no query is sent anywhere, logged, or placed in a URL. No code in this repository collects a reader's
behaviour. What the host serving these files records at the network level is outside this
repository, and this policy does not answer it.
What is settled and what is not
One rule is settled and pinned by a test: on the GMedAC marketplace, commission does not influence organic ranking. A change that let a commercial condition reorder the professionals a patient would see organically fails that test. That is a property of the code, not a paragraph of reassurance.
Whether a clearly labelled paid surface may ever exist elsewhere in the product is a different question, and it is undecided: a founder question this document does not settle. So the honest sentence is the narrow one. This journal carries no advertising and no sponsorship today, and this policy commits the journal. It does not speak for the company forever, and it must not be read as a settled statement that GMedAC will never build an advertising product anywhere.
If sponsorship is ever introduced here
Sponsorship arriving quietly, as a small template change nobody logged, is the failure this section prevents. If it is ever introduced, all of the following hold.
- It is a new decision, recorded as one, with a date, an owner and a stated reason. Editing this page without that record is not the mechanism.
- It is structurally separate from editorial content, not only labelled: its own template, its own container, its own route, never inline in an article body and never in the reading order of one. A label the reader has to notice is a weak control, and a sponsored block styled as an article defeats it entirely. A label is not a boundary.
- It never influences the ranking of a professional, on the marketplace or anywhere a professional is listed. A sponsor cannot buy ordering, a verification outcome, or how a verification summary is worded.
- It never influences editorial. A sponsor cannot commission, review, approve, delay or veto an article, and does not see one before publication.
- It appears on no page carrying
emergencyInformation: true. - It brings no tracker with it by default. The lint rule stays as it is, and any change to it is a deliberate, visible diff with its own decision record.
What this policy does not control
The lint rule recognises packages, not motives. It cannot distinguish a citation from a
favour. To a build check, an outbound link to a company page looks like an outbound link to a
regulator, and nothing in the pipeline asks why a particular source was chosen. The source
hierarchy limits the damage rather than removing it: COMPANY_STATEMENT is the weakest source
type in the vocabulary, and a HIGH or CRITICAL article may rest only on sources at or above
PEER_REVIEWED_STUDY. A MODERATE article may cite a company, and the check will accept it.
What stops a commercially motivated citation is the reviewer named on the article, which is a
human control and should be described as one.
This publication is published by GMedAC, which is building a marketplace in the field the publication writes about. That is a standing conflict of interest rather than a hypothetical one, and no rule in this repository dissolves it. Two things hold it in place: this journal does not rank or recommend individual professionals at all, and every article names its author and, where clinical or jurisdictional claims are made, its reviewer. A financial interest held by an author or reviewer in a subject belongs in the article record before publication, not in a note added after somebody asks.
Nothing above is a legal conclusion about advertising, healthcare promotion or sponsorship disclosure in any jurisdiction. Those rules differ by country and by profession, and none of them has been researched to a standard this repository would publish. The commitments here are editorial: some are held in place by the controls named above, and the rest are human commitments described as such. They say nothing about what any jurisdiction requires of a publisher that carries paid material, and they should not be quoted as though they did.