UX Mastery believes in the free flow of information. Unless otherwise noted, you can republish our articles online or in print for free under a Creative Commons Attribution No Derivatives licence. Here’s what you need to know:
- You have to credit us — ideally in the byline. We prefer “Author Name, UX Mastery.” If your CMS does not allow you to do this, please just include a line at the top of the story that reads: “This article was originally published by UX Mastery.”
- You must link to our website if you’re publishing online, using either a link back to our home page or to our article’s URL.
- You must include all of the existing links from our article. These have been carefully selected and form part of the original work.
- You must use our PublishPixel when republishing online. This is our simple page view counter – a 1×1 pixel invisible image that allows us and our authors to know the basics of when and where content is republished. If you use the Republish This Article button that accompanies each article you’ll include this correctly and automatically. See the PublishPixel section below for more information.
- You can’t edit our material, except to reflect relative changes in time and location. (For example, “yesterday” can be changed to “last week,” and “Melbourne” to “Melbourne, Australia” or “here.”) If you want to make more material edits, you must let us know and run them by the author for approval prior to publication.
- You cannot republish our photographs or illustrations without specific permission. This is because you’ll need to confirm you’re licenced to republish the images in our articles. Some images, such as those from commercial providers, don’t allow their images to be republished without permission or payment. Copyright terms are generally listed in the image caption and attribution. You are welcome to omit our images or to substitute your own. Charts and interactive graphics follow the same rules.
- It’s okay to put our articles on pages with ads, but not ads matched and sold specifically to match our stories. You also can’t state or imply that donations to your organisation support UX Mastery’s work.
- You can’t sell our articles or content material separately, but it’s okay to include it in commercial compilations. We’d appreciate a heads up and a copy of the work too.
- You can’t republish our material wholesale, or automatically, nor frame the content of our site; you need to select articles to be republished individually. To enquire about syndication or licencing opportunities, contact Amber Maurer at partnerships@uxmastery.com.
- You can’t use our work to populate a website designed to improve rankings on search engines, or to solely to gain revenue from network-based advertisements.
- You must include a prominent and effective way to contact you for any website in which our articles appear.
- We’d appreciate being tagged on social posts if you share republished articles on social media. We have official accounts for UX Mastery on most popular platforms. See our Contact Us page for correct handles.
Specific circumstances
- Extracts: you can run the first few lines or paragraphs of the article and then say: “Read the full article on UX Mastery” with a link back to the article.
- Quotes: you can quote authors provided you include a link back to the article URL.
- Translations: are technically a derivative under our Creative Commons licence and so require author approval before you can republish. Many authors will give their approval in good faith. Authors can be contacted by the links in their profile on our website.
- Edits: If you want to make material changes, you will need to run them by the author for approval prior to publication.
- Signed consent / copyright release forms are not required, providing you follow these guidelines exactly.
- Print: articles can be published in print under these same rules, with the exception that you do not need to include the page view counter or links. We would appreciate it if you would send an image of the whole republished article to publishing@uxmastery.com so that we can share it with the author.
- Podcast and video: are alse covered by the Creative Commons licence and the same attribution requirements apply.
The UX Mastery PublishPixel
Once you’ve republished the piece, please verify you have included our PublishPixel page counter correctly by contacting our content team at publishing@uxmastery.com
What is it?
UX Mastery’s PublishPixel is an invisible 1×1 pixel image that we ask publishers to include in articles we publish together, or in ones republished under our Creative Commons licence. It allows us and our authors to know when and where our content is republished and how much traffic the article has received.
Why are you doing this?
Our mission is to effect real change through publishing content and fostering community. One of the ways we do this is by providing world-class articles free of charge to outlets with shared goals, or who have large, influential audiences.
An important piece of information we need in return is a sense of the size of the audience our articles reach on our partner’s web sites. PublishPixel is simply an efficient way of getting these basic pageview statistics quickly.
How does it work?
The 1×1 pixel invisible image loads each time the article page is viewed, and reports the pageload back to UX Mastery’s analytics platform, where the time, URL and Page Title are recorded.
The PublishPixel code includes a unique ID number for each UX Mastery article so that we can map the page load with a specific piece. This means you’ll need to use the unique PublishPixel code for each article—if you’re copying the code from our Republish button that will be done automatically. But if you’re reusing code manually from another article or a saved template, be sure to update it to the correct ID number.
What will my users see?
Nothing. This will not affect your web page layout at all.
What does it track?
Two pieces of data are retained: 1) the referring URL and page title, so we know which site republished the article, and 2) the time and date when the pageload event is received by our analytics platform. PublishPixel doesn’t track visitors in any way, nor count anything on pages other than the one on which it is loaded.
Who will see the data?
UX Mastery holds the raw pageview data PublishPixel collects as confidential, and we will not share it with outsiders, period. It is used for internal analysis only.
A total number of pageviews across all articles, on all platforms, is aggregated publicly in our Audience statistics.
Does this violate my privacy policy?
We’re keenly aware of the importance of privacy, and fully support our partners in taking user privacy seriously. PublishPixel does not collect any user data or personal information at all —neither individually nor in the aggregate—nor does it attempt to set or read any cookies. It simply counts pageloads.
AdBlockers will successfully block the pixel.
Will it slow down my page or break things?
No. We’ve tested our code carefully. It is designed to have minimal impact, to deal with heavy loads, and it’s designed to “fail gracefully”, meaning that even if the pixel server is overloaded or affected, your web page will not be blocked or prevented from loading. If the counter creates giant white space in an article on your site due to your custom CSS, just add style="border:0; height:1px !important; width:1px !important;" into the tag to override any spacing.
Who can I contact with questions about it?
Contact Luke Chambers at publishing@uxmastery.com.
The UX Mastery logo
You can download a ready-to-use version of our logo from our Style Guide.