How it works

Organizations with established review, assessment, endorsement, or curation criteria can become Accredited TrustMarc Issuers. They may submit their own criteria for approval by the TrustMarc Standards Council or adopt an existing TrustMarc framework.

Once approved, they become TrustMarc Initiative Members authorized to issue TrustMarcs to the content they assess, curate, endorse, or publish. TrustMarcs can be assigned at scale through APIs, Airtable, FTP, and other workflows, with TrustMarc providing the underlying trust infrastructure and services.

The Registry

The TrustMarc Registry is the authoritative source for all TrustMarc certificates, TrustMarced items, endorsements, and associated metadata. It provides a transparent, verifiable record of who issued each TrustMarc, the standards and criteria applied, and the evidence supporting certification.

Designed for both people and machines, the Registry enables AI services, discovery systems, repositories, publishers, libraries, and other platforms to verify trust claims, discover trusted content, and incorporate trust metadata directly into their workflows.

As adoption grows, the Registry becomes a shared infrastructure for trust—making trust information persistent, discoverable, machine-readable, and reusable across the scholarly, policy, and public-interest information ecosystem.

Why trust a TrustMarc?

Because it points to a persistent digital certificate: a single, verifiable place to that details 

  • Provenance → Where did the item come from?

  • TrustMarc Issuer → Who is verifying it?

  • Metadata → What is it and how is it described?

  • Stewardship → Will it persist and remain citable over time?

  • Endorsements from 3rd parties who apply their own evaluation criteria

  • Details of criteria under which it has been vetted.

Management Tool

The Management Tool is the central platform for managing TrustMarcs at scale. Organizations can import and export records, administer certifications and endorsements, monitor impact and engagement, generate reports, manage users and workflows, and integrate TrustMarcs with AI systsems, repositories, publishing platforms, discovery services, and websites. It provides the tools needed to issue, track, govern, and measure trusted content across the information ecosystem.

By making trust signals measurable and auditable, the platform helps organizations understand how their content is being used and demonstrate its impact. It also provides insight into trust practices across the ecosystem, enabling organizations to see which certifications, endorsements, and criteria are most widely adopted.

Finally it allows third parties to augment their services with metadata submitted from other TrustMarc members.