One of our guiding principles as a publication is that authors’ work remains theirs. This hasn’t changed since launching our independent site earlier this year; quite the opposite. On a practical level, however, we knew that an important element was missing as long as authors couldn’t directly edit their articles, and members of our community mentioned this time and again as a must-have feature.
We’re thrilled to share that thanks to the hard work of several team members and partners, authors now have editing access to all their previously published work on TDS — including both articles that we’d brought over to our site ahead of its launch and those we accepted directly to our new platform.
Great power, great responsibility
Our relationship with our contributors is based on trust. We invest a great deal of time and effort in our initial screening and review process, and as a result, we’ve grown into a publication with hundreds of writers whose professional expertise matches their integrity.
The ability to edit published articles is one that we ask you to use judiciously. Fixing a typo we hadn’t caught, tweaking a chart based on reader feedback, and adding a link to a relevant new resource are all examples of post-publication changes we consider reasonable. We also know that the formatting in some of our older articles got a bit wonky during their migration to our new site; addressing these issues is perfectly fine, too.
What we ask authors to avoid is making any substantive changes to published stories without first initiating a conversation with our team, which you can do via email or directly from within your article. If you ever sense that an article you’ve published with us warrants a more thorough revision, we’d be happy to work with you on finding the best path forward.
How editing works
Whether or not you’ve already published with us on our new platform, making tweaks to your published articles is as straightforward as can be. Just head over to your list of articles (note: this link requires you to be logged in to the TDS Contributor Portal), hover over the article you’d like to work on, and either click on the title or on the Edit button.
Once you’re done, consider previewing your changes as they will appear on our site’s front end — look for the laptop symbol near the top-right corner of the editor screen, and click on Preview in new tab. This is especially important if you made any tweaks to a visual element in your article.
If everything looks good to go on your end, remember to click on the Save button to take your edits live. This also notifies our team about changes to a published article, and gives us a chance to double-check that everything is in order.
We hope all articles we’ve published on TDS stay here, but we recognize that sometimes authors wish to remove their work from our site. Up until now, you’ve had to contact us to ask our team to delete articles on your behalf; with this update, you can now do it without our intervention—in your article list, look for the Mark as Deleted button under the relevant title. (Feel free to reach out to us before deleting articles — in many cases, we can address the issues that prompted you to take this decision in the first place.)
Onwards and upwards!
With this new feature, we’ve made it through much of the long list of key improvements we wanted to offer authors on TDS. For all of you who’ve asked about editing access since our site’s launch, thank you for your patience! We hope to publish more of your work in the near future, especially now that our Author Payment Program has been running successfully for several months. And if you’re not yet a TDS author but would like to join our community, we’d love to see your work, too.
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