Independence and funding

A publication that reports on an industry has one obligation ahead of all the others: to be unambiguous about where its money comes from. Readers who know can discount a publication appropriately. Readers who find out later, from somebody else, are right to discount it entirely.

Who owns us

Baseline is published by USP COMMERCE S.L.U.. Full company details, including the registered address, the registry entry and the person responsible for editorial content, are in the imprint.

PLACEHOLDER: ownership statement, to be completed from the registered impressum.

What we do not take

From anyone, including any future investor or commercial partner:

• Paid placement, sponsored articles, or advertorial in any form
• Affiliate commission or referral fees on clinic bookings, tests or products
• Payment for inclusion in, removal from, or placement within the Baseline Index
• Press trips, hospitality, free scans, free panels, or gifts from any clinic or diagnostics company

The last one is the one the industry finds strangest, so to be explicit: we do not accept free testing. Where we need to know what a programme is like from the inside, we pay for it and we say what we paid.

What editorial independence commits us to

Independence is a set of specific refusals rather than a claim about character, so here are the refusals.

• No subject of coverage sees an article before publication. No drafts, no headlines, no embargoed copies, no courtesy reads.
• Nobody outside the editorial staff commissions an article, and nobody outside it can request one.
• No subject of coverage has a veto, an approval right, or a right of reply beyond the one every subject has, which is the corrections process.
• A published article is amended or withdrawn only through that process, which means producing evidence that something is factually wrong. Being unhappy with a conclusion is not evidence.
• No provider receives advance notice of where it will appear in the Baseline Index, or of what grade an assessment will carry.

If any of these are ever breached, the right response is to publish that fact here rather than to quietly stop claiming it.

How we handle a conflict we cannot remove

Every publication has commercial interests, and any publication claiming otherwise is not being straight with you. Ours is straightforward: this site benefits if it becomes influential, which gives us an incentive toward being provocative and a matching incentive toward being trusted. Those two pull in opposite directions, which is roughly the healthiest arrangement available.

What we can do is make the work checkable rather than ask you to take our word for it. Every price in the Index carries a named source and the date we verified it, and rows we could not confirm on a provider's own price page are marked as reported rather than published. Every evidence grade has published criteria and a stated condition under which it would change. Every claim in an article is referenced.

That apparatus is the point. If our coverage is ever bent toward somebody's commercial interest, it is what will show it, and we would rather hand you the tools than ask for your trust.

Where we are most likely to be wrong

Two places, named in advance so you can watch them.

The Index depends on prices that change without notice, and several providers publish no price at all, which means we are relying on secondary sources for those rows. We mark which is which, and the marked ones are the likelier errors.

Evidence grades compress a literature into one character. That is useful and it is lossy. Where a reasonable specialist would grade something differently, the article should say so, and if it does not, that is a failure of ours rather than a settled question.

Challenging us

editor@baseline-media.com. We publish substantive challenges, including the ones we lose. For a disputed figure, send the published page that contradicts ours and we will usually correct it the same day.