Help keep good science open to every reader.

A business with a public purpose

The Clean Paper is not an NGO or a charity. It is a for-profit commercial company. Profit matters: a project that never learns to pay for itself depends forever on unpaid work, personal subsidies, or both. But profit is not the only thing that matters.

We are trying to build a useful business — one that leaves serious scientific explanations open to the reader, treats attention with respect, and measures success partly by whether good information reaches people who are usually left outside it.

A sponsorship is therefore a commercial relationship, not a charitable donation. It should be covered by a clear agreement and an invoice. What makes it worth pursuing is the purpose that agreement can serve.

There are three honest ways to pay for a project like this

1. Fill it with advertising. Optimise every page for impressions, add more placements, and let traffic targets shape what gets published. This can make money. It also creates exactly the pressure toward noise, surveillance, and clickbait that The Clean Paper was built to resist.
2. Charge the reader. A paywall is cleaner than an advertising network, but it breaks our promise to leave no human behind. The people who have the hardest time reaching reliable scientific information — because of income, geography, or language — are often the least able to buy another subscription.
3. Find one sponsor whose mission reaches beyond itself. A company can fund access to one language without buying the reader’s attention or the newsroom’s conclusions. Its support is visible and credited. The articles remain free, the pages remain calm, and editorial responsibility stays where it belongs.

We want to see whether the third road can work.

What you would be helping us build

The Clean Paper takes scientific papers and explains what the researchers did, what they found, how strong the evidence is, and — just as importantly — what the result does not prove. We link back to the source and refuse to turn every result into a revolution.

Most first drafts are written by AI agents that work from the source paper. The published article is not an unattended model output: drafts are cross-checked, pass through editorial review, and remain the responsibility of the editor. This is an experiment in human-machine integration. The question is not whether AI can produce more text. It plainly can. The question is whether humans and AI can work together to produce something more careful than AI slop and more widely useful than either could sustain alone.

Translations are also AI-generated. That is how a small project can begin crossing language barriers at this scale. It is not a claim that every language is already equally strong. Some language editions still have limited coverage or need more frequent naturalness checks, and we say so openly. A sponsor for one language funds a higher review cadence, gives that edition priority when new articles are translated, and helps us improve it rather than merely keeping it present.

What the money pays for

• Hosting and distribution for the website, feeds, media, downloads, and the infrastructure behind them.
• Tool and AI subscriptions used to read, draft, translate, cross-check, build, and maintain the project.
• Legitimate access to source papers when a paper cannot be obtained through an open repository, an author, a library, or another lawful route.
• Image and media licences when the clearest visual explanation cannot be made from material we already have permission to use.
• Translation production and review especially the repeated language-specific work needed to find unnatural phrasing that a structural check cannot see.
• Technical maintenance and editorial time keeping the site reliable, correcting the record, checking claims, and publishing less rather than publishing carelessly.

We will not decorate this list with invented percentages. The scope, price, and deliverables belong in a straightforward sponsorship agreement.

Early, deliberately

The Clean Paper is at the beginning. We are still building the archive, earning trust, and learning how readers find us. Traffic is growing, but we will not present an early audience as a mature one, and we will not manufacture growth to make a sponsorship deck look better.

Content quality takes priority over traffic. No clickbait. No quota that forces a weak article into publication. No inflated claim because it might travel farther. A sponsor is not buying a guaranteed number of impressions; it is helping an evidence-first publication become worth returning to.

What one language sponsorship includes

• One sponsor for one language — not a wall of competing logos and not an auction for editorial space.
• Clear public acknowledgement on the sponsor page for that language, with the company’s logo and, if desired, a photograph of the founder, owner, or team behind the decision. The sponsorship and any relevant conflict of interest will be disclosed plainly.
• Priority and a more frequent quality-review cycle for the sponsored language.
• The ability to suggest papers, fields, or questions that deserve coverage.
• Honest aggregate reporting about the project and that language edition, without reader profiling or sponsor tracking.

Topic suggestions are welcome because good ideas can come from anywhere. Coverage is never guaranteed, and neither is a favourable conclusion.

The editorial covenant: sponsorship buys support and public credit. It does not buy censorship, advance approval, a veto, the suppression of inconvenient evidence, or the right to rewrite a conclusion. The right of reply is available to everyone, whether they sponsor us or not. Corrections are decided by evidence.

Who we will not accept

We will not host sponsors whose core business is betting or gambling, tobacco, predatory products, or — more generally — making money through substantial harm to people. No policy can anticipate every company or every change in conduct, so fit is reviewed case by case and can be reconsidered if the facts change.

Money is useful. Trust is harder to replace.

Put a name and a face behind one language

If your company wants to leave the world a little better than it found it, tell us which language you care about and why. Tell us what your mission is. Tell us whose photograph belongs in the empty frame — a founder, an owner, a team, or the people doing the work.

Write to contact@thecleanpaper.com. We will start with a conversation, not a checkout page.