Mission and non-profit alignment

1. Core positioning

TextRefs is a non-profit, open, and non-commercial infrastructure association based in Zürich. The association does not operate a publishing business, a commercial platform, a members’ mutual-aid organization, or a professional or trade body.

TextRefs advances scholarship, education, culture, and digital research infrastructure by building, maintaining, and publishing an open, persistent, and machine-readable registry for canonical text references.

The public benefit lies in particular in making canonical text passages, works, citation and reference systems, external identifiers, resolver targets, and mapping statements durably, transparently, machine-readably, citably, and independently addressable — independent of any single proprietary platform.

2. Non-profit guardrails

The activity of the association shall be conducted in a way that is compatible with the requirements for tax exemption on grounds of public benefit in the Canton of Zürich:

exclusive and irrevocable dedication of funds to the association’s purpose;
activity in the general interest;
an open circle of beneficiaries;
selflessness;
no commercial or self-help purposes;
no distributions to members, founders, board members, or persons close to them;
no exclusive advantages for members;
transparent financial reporting;
proportionate and documented expense and compensation rules;
on dissolution, dedication of the remaining assets to a tax-exempt institution based in Switzerland with the same or a similar purpose.

3. Delimitation

The association is in particular not:

a full-text database;
a critical edition;
a publisher;
a commercial API or SaaS provider;
a representation of members’ interests only;
a rights-clearing house;
a substitute for library catalogues, edition platforms, Perseus, Loeb, TLG, PHI, DTS, CTS, or comparable offerings.

TextRefs primarily publishes reference, metadata, mapping, provenance, and status information. Copyright-protected edition texts, critical apparatus, commentaries, or translations from protected editions are not, as a matter of principle, hosted.