Editorial policy: sourcing, dating and corrections

This page tells you where the facts in these guides come from, why each one carries a date, and what the desk does when a reader proves a passage wrong. The short answer: the Review writes from primary sources, stamps everything it publishes with the day it ran, and fixes its errors where they sit rather than letting them age in place.

You will not find a legal notice below. A policy you cannot read is a policy you cannot check, so this one is written the way the guides are, in plain sentences you can hold against the sources behind them.

How the desk picks a source

A claim is not true because five blogs repeat it. Repetition is how workshop lore gets dressed up as fact, and children's publishing carries plenty of it: word counts recited as law, formatting habits presented as commandments. When a guide here rests on an official source, the desk reads that source itself. Questions about what the law protects are checked with the Office that administers the law, not with another writer's summary of a summary.

The rule runs both ways. When a source gives no number, the guide says so instead of rounding one in, and every organization described in these pages is described in the third person. The Review reports on the field of children's books. It does not speak for the societies, publishers or agencies it covers, and it is not part of any of them.

Why does every guide carry a date?

Because publishing advice ages, and copyright shows how fast. Congress passed the first federal copyright law in 1790 and has kept updating it since. Under the current law, the rules turn on when a work was created:

• For a work created on or after January 1, 1978, protection runs for the author's lifetime plus seventy years.
• For a joint work, it runs for seventy years past the death of the last surviving author.
• For a work made for hire, or an anonymous or pseudonymous work, it lasts 95 years from publication or 120 years from creation, whichever ends first.

Works from before 1978 sit on a different clock, and the Office spells that one out in a separate circular on duration. The Office's FAQ adds one more date that bites: registering within five years of publication counts as evidence in court. Advice with no date cannot be trusted on a subject where the clocks themselves start on dates, so every guide here runs with the day it was written, and the Copyright Office's general FAQ is where these figures were checked.

What happens when the desk is wrong?

A reader writes in, the desk rereads the primary source, and if the passage strays from it the passage gets corrected where it lives, not quietly buried under newer pages. The date stays with the correction, so you can always see what was claimed and when.

Some corrections are myths retired early. Mailing a manuscript to yourself, the old "poor man's copyright," still turns up in conversations among writers. The copyright law contains no provision for it, and it is no substitute for registration, which is voluntary but required before the owner of a U.S. work can sue over it. If you catch an error of that weight in these pages, tell the desk, and it will be checked and fixed.

What copyright.gov holds

copyright.gov is the website of the U.S. Copyright Office, which calls it the definitive source of copyright information. Beyond its FAQ it holds circulars like Copyright Basics, registration guidance, a Fair Use Index and a timeline of copyright history, and the Office has served the public since 1870. The desk keeps its own short shelf of primary references. The next time a critique partner quotes a copyright rule at you, open the Office's FAQ and read the entry before you repeat it.