Commercial disclosure

Last updated: 13 August 2026.

What this means

CASRAI is a 501(c)(3) nonprofit. The core reference material on this site — the CASRAI Dictionary, CRediT resources, standards documentation, and the implementation and policy guidance under /credit, /standards, /implement and /for-authors — is free, ad-free, and carries no commercial relationships whatsoever. There are exactly two exceptions, both described below: affiliate links in our AI-tools coverage, and display placements for a commercial partner on our long-form content pages.

1. Affiliate links — AI writing & research tools

Our AI Writing & Research Tools hub is a small set of pages reviewing and comparing commercial AI detection and AI writing-assistant software that researchers regularly ask us about. Some links on those pages are affiliate/referral links. If you click one and sign up for the linked product, CASRAI may earn a commission — at no extra cost to you. Where a vendor has given us a discount code for readers (for example Paperpal's PAP20), we disclose that alongside the link.

2. Partner placements — LAC Health (lac.us)

LAC Health (lac.us, operated by LA Consilium LLC) is a medical and laboratory supply distributor and a commercial partner of CASRAI. You will see display placements for LAC Health — a banner at the top of the page, and on some templates a card in the sidebar — on our long-form content pages: guides, comparisons, topic pillars, and news articles. They do not appear on the Dictionary, CRediT, or standards pages.

To be precise about what this relationship is and is not: CASRAI receives no payment for these placements, and CASRAI and LAC Health do not share owners or corporate control. It is a partnership, not advertising bought at a rate card and not a corporate affiliation. We still label the placements visibly and route every outbound link to LAC Health with rel="sponsored nofollow", which tells search engines not to pass ranking credit through them — the conservative treatment, applied because these are promotional placements regardless of whether money changed hands.

Where LAC Health appears in editorial content — as a worked example of CRediT implementation on our homepage, or in supplier-reference material — it is identified as a partner at the point of mention. We do not publish ranked "best supplier" lists, and a partnership does not buy a favourable ranking or a recommendation over any competitor.

Which tools this applies to

Originality.ai — full review
GPTZero — full review
SciSpace — full review
Paperpal — full review
Jenni.ai — full review

We do not have an affiliate relationship with every tool in this category — for example, we deliberately do not cover or link Undetectable.ai, since we have no referral arrangement with them and won't fabricate one.

Editorial independence

Recommendations on these pages are based on our own research into each tool's actual features, pricing, and documented accuracy — not on which vendor pays the highest commission. We say so explicitly when a tool has a real limitation (for example: no AI detector, including the ones we link, should be the sole basis for an academic-integrity decision — false-positive rates are real and documented). If our assessment of a tool changes, the page changes; the affiliate relationship doesn't buy favorable coverage.

The same rule governs the LAC Health partnership. Our procurement and supply-chain guidance is written to help a reader choose well among real options — including options that compete with our partner — and is researched from primary sources (regulations, standards bodies, federal guidance) rather than from any vendor's marketing. Where we describe LAC Health's own capabilities, we say plainly that they are a partner and we source the specifics to LAC Health itself rather than presenting them as our independent assessment. A commercial relationship buys placement and disclosure on this site. It does not buy a ranking, a recommendation, or a claim we have not verified.

How this supports CASRAI's mission

Referral revenue from this small set of pages goes toward CASRAI's nonprofit work — maintaining the free CRediT taxonomy, the CASRAI Dictionary, and our standards-development activities. This is a new, small revenue stream for CASRAI, introduced in 2026. As with any nonprofit's commercial activity, whether and how affiliate income is treated for tax purposes is a standing internal policy question we keep under review with CASRAI's own finance and governance functions — this page will be updated if that policy changes.