Advertising policy

MedCaseReports accepts display advertising (the main bar, the side rectangle, the in-text module), partner logos (in a section heading, on the partners list, in the footer) and labelled partner material. Advertising funds open access to the published cases and does not replace the publication fees described in the terms of service.

The commercial terms of an emission are set by the advertising offer and the General Terms of Emission; this page describes the editorial rules advertising has to follow and what a reader may know about it.

• advertising of prescription-only medicinal products addressed to anyone other than those entitled to prescribe or trade in them;
• material that imitates editorial content: a case report, a commentary, a review or a news item not labelled as advertising;
• creatives without the warnings and information the law requires, including a medical device without its name and intended purpose;
• messages addressed to patients rather than to healthcare professionals;
• dietary supplements with therapeutic claims;
• advertising of devices intended for professional use only, until the site can confirm that the audience is healthcare professionals.

The list is not exhaustive: the editorial office may refuse any advertisement that, in its judgement, would undermine trust in the journal.

Every creative is seen and approved by the editorial office before its first emission; the editor-in-chief may veto any advertisement, including one already running. A refusal is passed to the advertiser with its reasons. Decisions to accept, approve, pause and end an emission are recorded in the editorial change log.

Selling advertising and editorial work on publications are separate roles. An advertiser has no access to submitted manuscripts, to reviews or to the publication schedule.

Every advertising unit is labelled "Advertisement" and carries a "Why this ad?" note naming the advertiser and the rules of selection. Advertising sits in fixed, clearly separated places on the page and is never interleaved with the text of a publication.

One slot in a given scope and period belongs to one advertiser; we run no rotation. An advertisement for a product is not shown next to a publication that describes that product: the advertiser names excluded terms and the site leaves out the pages that contain them.

Advertising has no bearing on the acceptance of a manuscript, the course of its review, the editing of its text, its publication date or the awards given to authors, including the Books for Cases programme. Advertisers have no access to manuscripts, reviews or information about what the editorial office is working on, and no advertisements are shown in the submission wizard or in the author, reviewer and editorial panels.

An advertisement for a product or a company is neither an editorial recommendation nor a confirmation of its efficacy or safety.

An advertisement is chosen by the page alone: its section (for example surgery), its language version and its type (home page, publications list, publication, news). We use no data about the reader: no browsing history, no profile, no location, no account data.

Measurement uses no cookies and no identifier stored on the reader's device. The site counts, on its own side, impressions (the advertisement was rendered), viewable impressions (at least half of it visible for at least one second) and clicks. To count how many different readers saw an advertisement in a month, we store an irreversible code calculated from the IP address and the browser identification, using a secret key that changes every month. The key is deleted after the monthly report is produced; from then on the stored codes can no longer be linked to anything, and the raw events are deleted after 92 days. After the key is deleted, neither the address nor the person can be recovered from this data.

A click goes through the site's redirect, which adds the standard UTM parameters to the landing address (source: medcasereports.com, medium: display, campaign name, creative, page type, section and language version). The advertiser receives neither the address of the page the reader came from nor any data about the reader. The monthly report for the advertiser holds aggregate figures only: impressions, viewable impressions, the number of users, clicks, invalid clicks, CTR, served time and a screenshot of the unit.

Partner material is a text prepared by or for an advertiser, published in the news section with a visible "Partner material" label and the partner's name, and shown on the home page for a limited time. It is not peer reviewed, is not a publication of the journal and has no DOI. The editorial office checks it against the rules above and may refuse to publish it.

We pass no e-mail addresses or other reader data to advertisers and send no messages on their behalf to the newsletter's subscribers. Partners' commercial information may reach only people who gave a separate, explicit consent to it; consent to the editorial newsletter is not treated as such consent.

Comments on advertising on the site, including a report of an advertisement that in a reader's view breaks these rules, are taken by the editorial office. Every report is considered by the editor-in-chief; a questionable advertisement may be paused until it is resolved. Advertisers' complaints about an emission are handled under the General Terms of Emission.