Everything you need to understand what a TrustMarc is, who it is for, and how to participate.
A TrustMarc makes an organization’s existing trust practices visible, helping people and machines understand why content can be trusted.
A TrustMarc makes an organization’s existing trust practices visible. It does not create new trust standard or certify quality — it surfaces the policies, governance, preservation, provenance, and other evidence of trustworthiness that already exist, so that both readers and automated systems can see them.
In short, a TrustMarc reveals the trust elements that underpin publications.
Peer review is just one possible indicator of trust. A TrustMarc can reveal many different types of trust signal used by publishers, repositories, think tanks, government agencies, NGOs, and research organizations. Peer review may be one of those signals, but it is far from the only one.
No. A TrustMarc indicates that documented criteria have been met or disclosed. It does not judge whether the underlying research or content is correct. It tells you what practices and policies stand behind the content, so you can make your own informed assessment.
No. TrustMarcs surface and make existing standards visible. Organizations continue to define their own criteria, and existing standards bodies continue to do what they already do. Publications may be backed by more than one trust standard, TrustMarcs bring them together into a single place, making the whole trust story easily and quickly visible to both humans and machines.
A wide range of trusted organizations can issue TrustMarcs, including:
Trusted organizations issue TrustMarcs, but they don't self-appoint the standards they issue against. TrustMarcs are issued against criteria reviewed and approved through an open process guided by the independent TrustMarc Standards Council — a group of recognized experts in librarianship, preservation, publishing, and Global South scholarship, operating at arm's length from any single vendor. Importantly, the Council does not assess individual items or content. Instead, it reviews and approves the frameworks and criteria that Issuers use, keeping them transparent, consistent, and publicly documented.
Yes. Multiple organizations can independently endorse the same content using their own criteria. This is one of the most powerful aspects of the model — a single item can carry endorsements from several trusted sources at once.
Yes. TrustMarcs are particularly useful for institutional repositories because they make repository governance, preservation policies, metadata practices, and institutional trust much more visible. A great deal of the trust an IR has already earned is invisible today; a TrustMarc makes it explicit.
Yes. Many publishers maintain detailed editorial and board policies that readers rarely discover. TrustMarcs give publishers a way to expose those editorial policies directly alongside their content, so the rigor behind a title becomes visible to readers and discovery systems.
A TrustMarc can surface a range of information, such as:
TrustMarcs are registered in an open registry and can be discovered by participating systems. The registry is designed to be transparent, so the record of who has endorsed what — and against which criteria — is openly available.
No. Organizations provide their metadata and trust criteria, and the TrustMarc registry manages the rest. There is no software to install to get started.
Yes. The initiative is designed so that discovery platforms and other services can surface TrustMarcs alongside content. The goal is for a TrustMarc to travel with the content and appear wherever readers find it.
Yes. TrustMarcs are structured so that both people and automated systems can read them. This is what allows discovery services, and increasingly AI systems, to take an item’s trust signals into account.
Yes. In addition to import and export options, an API allows participating systems to exchange TrustMarc data programmatically, which matters for organizations working at volume.
The criteria are developed and maintained by the Initiative, not invented from scratch by each organization. Rather than a single universal checklist, the Initiative defines a distinct criteria set for each organization and content type — each with a baseline of minimum (mandatory) requirements plus additional optional criteria you can meet over time.
Separate criteria sets exist for different kinds of participant, including:
Because the criteria are tailored to your type of organization or content, you are only assessed against requirements that are relevant to what you actually do.
Each criteria set includes a defined baseline of mandatory requirements that must be met before a TrustMarc is issued, grouped into categories. Meeting these minimums qualifies you; optional criteria then let you surface additional strengths.
For an institutional repository, for example, the baseline spans categories such as:
For a primary source collection, the mandatory categories include identity and provenance, authenticity, description and metadata, access and transparency, preservation, and ethical stewardship.
The specific requirements differ by type, and the Initiative develops and reviews these criteria through its governance so they stay consistent and current.
You need to meet the minimum (mandatory) criteria for your organization or content type. Beyond that baseline, TrustMarcs expose what already exists rather than requiring you to satisfy every possible best practice — optional criteria simply surface additional strengths as you have them. Where a required policy is genuinely missing, that becomes a clear, addressable gap rather than a hidden shortfall, and in some cases it is one the Initiative’s infrastructure partner can help you fill.
Yes. Organizations can add additional criteria as their practices evolve. A TrustMarc is not a one-time snapshot — it can grow as your policies and governance mature.
Yes. Organizations can demonstrate alignment with recognized community frameworks — for example, COPE (the Committee on Publication Ethics), which sets widely used standards for publication ethics such as handling corrections, retractions, and conflicts of interest. Membership in or compliance with such a framework can be represented within your TrustMarc, so the standards you already meet become part of the picture.
The criteria are developed and maintained by the Initiative and reviewed through its independent governance and council. They differ by organization and content type, each with a mandatory minimum plus optional criteria. Organizations disclose their own practices against these criteria, and third parties — such as COPE — can define their own endorsement criteria that layer on top.
Yes. If your organization already has a trust or quality framework, its evidence can be surfaced through the relevant TrustMarc criteria set, and you can demonstrate alignment with recognized third-party frameworks. The Initiative defines the criteria that structure a TrustMarc, but those criteria are designed to reflect the practices organizations already have rather than to impose an entirely new framework.
Yes. Because a TrustMarc reflects documented practices and endorsements, it can be updated or withdrawn if the circumstances behind it change. The registry is designed to keep the record current.
Requirements vary by content type and organization. In general, you provide the descriptive metadata you already maintain along with a statement of your trust criteria. Where metadata needs enhancement, that can be arranged separately — but it is not a prerequisite for getting started.
The initiative is community-driven. Coherent provides the infrastructure, but governance comes through an independent council and the participating organizations. The intent is a clear, arm’s-length relationship: Coherent builds and runs the systems, while the community sets the direction.
Organizations can already express interest in becoming development partners during the MVP phase. Early partners help shape how the initiative works and are among the first to carry TrustMarcs.
A broad range of scholarly and research outputs can receive TrustMarcs, including:
AI systems increasingly draw on published and gray literature, but they have limited ways to tell trustworthy sources apart. Because TrustMarcs are machine-readable, they give AI systems structured signals about the practices behind a piece of content — helping surface material that is backed by real governance, preservation, and editorial policy.
TrustMarcs are designed to travel with content and be surfaced by discovery platforms. That means the trust signals behind an item can help it be found and contextualized wherever readers are searching, rather than being buried in a policy document few people ever see.
Libraries constantly evaluate whether content is trustworthy enough to surface to their users. TrustMarcs make that judgment easier by exposing the governance and policies behind material — including collections and gray literature that currently carry no visible trust signal at all. Beyond helping users, adopting TrustMarcs adds reach and protection to a university's own outputs: greater discoverability for all institutional content — including special collections — through learning management systems and AI tools; verified trust signals for the white papers, briefs, blogs, videos, podcasts, and proceedings produced by policy centers, departments, and institutional repositories that usually carry none; added security against spoofing and AI-generated fakes, since each mark links to a persistent, verifiable certificate; and enhanced impact and usage tracking to demonstrate the reach of the university's work.
Publishers invest heavily in editorial standards, board policies, and preservation, yet readers rarely see any of it. A TrustMarc makes that investment visible at the point of use, helping smaller and specialist imprints get recognition for the rigor they already apply.
Researchers need to assess sources quickly. A TrustMarc gives them an at-a-glance view of the practices behind a work — who stands behind it, under what policies, and with what preservation and provenance — so they can judge relevance and reliability faster.
Many institutions in the Global South maintain rigorous, well-documented policies and hold valuable content, yet that trustworthiness is often overlooked. TrustMarcs make existing institutional trust visible on equal terms, helping nationally accredited and recognized institutions get the recognition their content deserves.
Preservation is one of the practices a TrustMarc can surface. If your organization has a preservation policy, a TrustMarc can make it visible. If preservation is required by a particular community’s criteria and you do not yet have it in place, that becomes a clear, addressable gap rather than a hidden shortfall.
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