Source materials

In brief. Bracket holds public UN climate documents so that researchers can cite the wording a meeting was negotiating. The programme also holds published reporting for reading and citation under each publisher's conditions. Source documents retain their own rights; permission to use the team's annotations or notes does not grant rights over those sources. Bracket is independent of the UNFCCC, access is not sold, and the collection is used for non-commercial research. Write to contact@bracketresearch.org with questions or corrections.

1. The collection

The text library contains adopted decisions, conference reports, draft conclusions and decisions, conference room papers, informal notes, non-papers and foundation texts such as the Convention, Kyoto Protocol and Paris Agreement. Versions are kept separately so that citations can identify the wording available at the time of a meeting.

Documents come from the UNFCCC's public document services, public addresses, archive captures and files downloaded by researchers from public sources. Automated collection uses identified, limited requests and does not bypass access protections. Each retained file has a source address and a digital fingerprint that allows its contents to be checked.

The received PDF is the copy of record and is kept unchanged. Displayed text is extracted for reading and citation; extraction can introduce errors, which should be reported. Paragraph references follow the document's own numbering where available. Source text and Bracket's annotations remain distinct.

2. UNFCCC documents and permissions

The UNFCCC's terms describe official texts, data and documents as public domain where their content is unchanged and the source acknowledged. They also grant website content for personal, non-commercial use, with restrictions on resale, redistribution, compilation and derivative works. Bracket's use preserves source attribution and treats redistribution of the compiled collection as a separate permission question.

The programme uses the documents internally for non-commercial research. Before publishing, sharing or redistributing the collection outside the authorised team, it will seek the secretariat's written permission. Party submissions and presentations may have separate rights and need separate consideration. This approach does not claim ownership of the source documents or unrestricted permission to distribute the collection.

The Acceptable use rules prohibit commercial use of the collection, including paid consultancy products and commercial model training. A researcher's own funding does not override any source's conditions.

3. Bracket's annotations and research contributions

Bracket adds paragraph labels, version relationships, topic and agenda codes, links between references, and counts used to inspect texts. These additions are distinguishable from source wording. Citations connecting field notes to passages are research contributions and follow the Terms of use and Privacy notice.

If the project's own document-annotation layer is separately released, the intended licence is CC BY 4.0, which permits reuse with credit. That intention does not license source documents, contributors' notes or the collated research dataset. Public dataset release remains outside the current programme arrangements and requires a separate decision and appropriate contributor terms.

4. Published reporting

The programme holds published reporting separately from Bracket's text library. Full copies are used for reading and citation within the source's conditions, not republished as a collection.

For any proposed reuse, check the conditions of the particular item. A source being publicly readable does not remove copyright. Quotation exceptions have conditions and do not amount to permission to redistribute a whole collection.

5. Names and excluded material

Published sources may name negotiators and chairs. The programme does not build personal profiles or indexes from those names, or link them to the team's observations. Published reporting remains outside Bracket; adding access through the tool would require a separate review of permissions and safeguards.

Participant lists held in the archive are not imported into the text library, processed to extract names or shown to team members. Archived pages may retain published contact details as received; those pages are not used to build a directory of people. The text library is in English; other language editions may remain in the separate archive.

Cite published sources without copying delegate identities into the team's observations. Citing a published author by name remains normal academic practice. About the Bracket study explains the programme's responsibilities towards people named in documents.

6. Citation and corrections

Identify an official document by its title, official reference, date, version and paragraph. For example:

UNFCCC, title of document, official reference (date), paragraph number.

Identify reporting by its author or publisher, title, issue or publication date and page. Keep quotations faithful to the source and distinguish your analysis from its wording. Report missing versions, extraction errors or rights concerns to contact@bracketresearch.org.