Terms of use
This page sets out the terms on which Reference Source is offered. It is short because the site is simple: static pages of published facts, free to read, with no accounts, no payments and nothing to sign up for. Using the site or the connector means accepting what is below.
What the site offers
Reference Source publishes reference data — regulatory thresholds, deadlines, version pairings, certification statuses, error codes — assembled from public sources. Every value is stored with the URL it came from and a verbatim passage from that page, and those two things are shown beside it. The method page describes exactly how a record is made and what the markings on it mean.
The site is free to use. There is no charge, no subscription, no account and no login, and there is no plan to add one that gates the data.
What "verified" does and does not mean
A value marked verified appears word for word in the passage quoted directly below it, from the source cited, as that page read on the date shown. That is a statement about what the source says. It is not a warranty that the source is correct, that it was correct when it was written, or that it is still correct today.
Sources change, get amended, get withdrawn and are sometimes simply wrong. Every page therefore carries the date it was last checked and a date by which it is due to be checked again, and a page that has passed that date says so at the top rather than looking current.
No advice, and check before you rely on it
Nothing here is legal, regulatory, medical, financial, safety or professional advice. The data is a pointer to a primary source, not a substitute for reading it.
Where a decision matters — a compliance deadline, an exposure limit, a certification status, a filing threshold — follow the link and read the original. That link is on every record for exactly this purpose, and the quoted passage is there so you can see what was relied on. The site is offered as-is and as-available, with no warranty of accuracy, completeness, fitness for a particular purpose or uninterrupted availability, and no liability is accepted for any loss arising from reliance on it. That is the honest position for anything assembled from other people's pages, and it is why the evidence is published alongside every value instead of asked to be taken on trust.
Corrections
An error in a value, a quoted passage that does not support the value attached to it, a source that has moved or changed — all are worth reporting and all are acted on. Write to [email protected]. Anything found to be wrong is corrected or withdrawn; a stale page is marked stale rather than deleted.
If you are the publisher of a source and object to how a row drawn from your page is used here, write to the same address and it will be dealt with.
Reuse of the data
Facts are not owned, but a publisher's expression of them can be. What is published here is a fact, the URL it came from, and a short attributed passage that links back to the original. Each dataset states its own licence position on its own page, and each source's terms were checked before its rows were included — rows from a source whose terms forbid reuse are not published.
If you use this data, cite the original sources. They are listed on every record for that reason. Reproducing whole datasets wholesale, or presenting the data as your own without the sources, is not what these pages are here for; quoting a value with its source and a link is.
The connector and the machine-readable copies
The MCP connector at https://referencesource.org/mcp and its sibling endpoints, the Markdown twin of every page, /<dataset>/data.json and /catalog.json are all offered on the same terms as the pages themselves: free, anonymous, read-only and without warranty. The connector's tools only read records already published on this site. They require no account and no API key, and they hold no user identity — the privacy note sets out what that means for anything sent to them.
Two requests in return:
- Be reasonable about volume. These are static pages behind a CDN, so ordinary automated use is fine and welcome — AI crawlers are explicitly allowed in robots.txt. Traffic heavy enough to degrade the service for others may be rate-limited or blocked.
- Do not use the connector to try to reach anything other than this site's own published records. The tools cannot do it, and attempting to make them is misuse.
The endpoints, tool names and response shapes may change as the datasets change, and an endpoint may be withdrawn. Where that would break an existing caller, it will be said on the connector page rather than done silently, but no availability or stability guarantee is given.
Changes to these terms
These terms may be updated. The version in force is the one on this page, and the date it was published or last updated is shown at the top. There is no mailing list to notify, because there are no accounts — if you depend on the data, the date on this page is the thing to watch.