<aside> <img src="/icons/book-closed_blue.svg" alt="/icons/book-closed_blue.svg" width="40px" /> MuckRock’s User Guide gives you everything to make the most out of MuckRock’s suite of tools. If this has helped you, consider donating to support our work!
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MuckRock hosts and manages several services, including DocumentCloud, MuckRock Requests and MuckRock Accounts. Sharing — within your organization, with the general public, and with individual external reviewers — works a bit differently on each of our services.
Your account is your point of access to our records request service (MuckRock Requests), DocumentCloud, and to a growing suite of services provided by our trusted partners. Organizational memberships and affiliations as well as payments and payment processing are managed in your account profile.
User profiles are not publicly visible on our MuckRock Accounts (URLs starting with https://accounts.muckrock.com/), but user profiles (including organizational affiliations) are visible on MuckRock requests (URLs starting with https://www.muckrock.com/accounts/profile/).
Organizations allow multiple accounts to collaborate and share resources.
Organizations on MuckRock can be marked as private, meaning the organization is not discoverable in the organization search.
If an organization on MuckRock is public, the names of the admins of the organization will be publicly visible. Names of non-admin members are not visible.
Documents have their privacy initially set during upload. During upload, your active organization will be associated with the document.
After uploading, modify a document’s visibility by taking the “Edit Metadata” action on it.
Documents uploaded by a user on DocumentCloud limit their visibility depending on multiple factors:
Each document has its own access level: private, organization, or public.
A private document is only viewable and editable only by user who uploaded it.
An organization document is viewable, editable, and deletable by users who belong to the same organization as you. The organization associated with a document is set when it’s uploaded and cannot be changed later.
If a document is made public and the user who originally uploaded it leaves, or is removed from, your organization, the uploading user loses edit access to their document. This means that former employees won’t be able to make changes to published documents after they leave your newsroom.
A public document is visible to the entire web, not just DocumentCloud users. Only verified users can make a document publicly visible. A public document is editable by other members of the organization the document was uploaded to.
If a document belongs to a project, then it will be visible to that project’s collaborators, regardless of its individual access setting.
Public documents may also be hidden from search engines like Google and from DocumentCloud’s public listings. This is a separate setting from the other access level restrictions. In other words, a document can be both public and also hidden.
This allows a public document to be embedded in an article without the document appearing in other search engines. In this case, any embeds of or links to the document will provide public view access, but the document will not generally discoverable.