You have written an AI policy. This is the layer that runs it.
PaperAlly gives an institution one vocabulary for AI delegation, a place for members to read your own rules while they work, and an aggregate picture of whether records are being kept, with no way to read anybody's draft.
Not a detector. No AI-likelihood score, ever.
What an administrator opens
A members table. Counts. An audit log of their own actions. That is the whole console.
What they cannot open: a draft, a title, a warrant record, a delegation record, or any figure small enough to be one person.
The gap this fills
The duty to disclose AI use is close to universal. The vocabulary for doing it is not.
HEPI Policy Note 71, May 2026 (Sam Illingworth, Edinburgh Napier University), which found "no model AI policy, no agreed minimum standard, no shared vocabulary for the levels of AI use that might be permitted or encouraged and no sector-wide framework that institutions could adapt".
A published delegation-warrant standard is exactly that missing vocabulary: task families, three warrant states, seven rules and a six-component record for each delegated task. It is citable, it is free to adopt in a handbook whether or not you ever use the software, and it is the same in every department.
What an institution gets
Everything below is in the console today.
A shared vocabulary, the same in every department
Task families, three warrant states, seven rules and a six-part record for each delegated task. Your handbook can name it, your markers can apply it, and a student moving between departments meets the same words twice.
Your policy, read where the work happens
You set the link and a short note, and your members read your rules on their own organisation page rather than a generic statement of ours. PaperAlly supplies the vocabulary. The policy stays yours.
Aggregate assurance that identifies nobody
How many papers are in progress, how the warrant states are spread across declared tasks, how many tasks carry a complete record and a named human check. Counts, and no route to a person.
Groups
Gather a module, a programme or an intake, and read the same figures for that group alone. Below the small-group threshold the figures are withheld, because a count over three people is a person.
A record the member owns
The delegation record belongs to the person who made it. Joining an organisation does not hand it over and leaving does not take it away.
An audit log of your own conduct
Every administrative action here, in order, with who did it. It is what an institution needs when somebody asks what the office actually did.
Assurance, not surveillance
This is a product decision, made once, and it is why the console is shaped the way it is.
"An evidence-retention protocol for potential misconduct investigations." "Conditional trust, where students must earn confidence through declarations and evidence retention, reproduces the same assumption with better vocabulary."
That criticism is correct, and it is aimed at tools that put a student's process in front of an administrator. So we did not build that.
HEPI Policy Note 71, May 2026. The note also observes that a student keeping process evidence "is building a defence file".
An institution gets assurance, never surveillance. Nobody here can open a member's draft, their sections, their warrant records or their delegation record. Every institutional view of an individual's work is either something that person shared or a record of something they did. A member is told this in the invitation, before they join, in the same words their administrator reads in the console. Anybody can check that the two match.
What the console shows, and what it cannot
An institution gets assurance, never surveillance. Nobody here can open a member's draft, their sections, their warrant records or their delegation record. Every institutional view of an individual's work is either something that person shared or a record of something they did.
PaperAlly is not a detector and produces no AI-likelihood score, so nothing here can be read as a suspicion about anybody.
What an administrator sees
- Who belongs to the organisation, their role, their department and whether their membership is active.
- Counts across the whole organisation or a group: how many papers are in progress, how the warrant states are spread across declared tasks, how many tasks carry a complete record and a named human check.
- The audit log of what administrators themselves have done here.
- Anything a member has chosen to share with them, for as long as that member leaves it shared.
What an administrator never sees
- A member's manuscript, sections or drafting.
- The titles of a member's papers, or which paper any figure came from.
- A member's warrant records, sign-offs or delegation records, unless that member shared them.
- Anything a member asked the assistant, or anything it answered.
- Any figure small enough to be traced back to one person.
What an institution licence covers
PaperAlly is licensed software. Anybody may try an audit, and an institution buys one agreement instead of asking its members to arrange anything themselves.
One agreement, and nobody arranging their own
An institution licence covers your members under a single agreement. They sign in as themselves and their access follows from the licence, so no student and no member of staff is left buying anything to take part in something you have adopted.
It buys access, never visibility
A licence changes what your members may do. It changes nothing whatever about what anybody can see. An administrator holding one still cannot open a member's draft, their paper titles, their warrant records or their delegation record, because those views are not built and are not waiting behind a licence to be unlocked.
The record still belongs to the member
Joining a licensed organisation does not hand a member's delegation record over, and leaving does not take it away. The licence is an agreement about access between you and us. It is not a claim on your members' work.
What it unlocks for them
Audits without a limit, the paper builder, the delegation record, the record as structured data you can keep, sharing a record with a supervisor or a reviewer, and the institutional surfaces on this page.
How many people it covers
Settled with you when it is issued and written into the licence, rather than assumed here. Tell us the shape of the group you have in mind, a module, a programme, a department or the institution, and we will sort it out.
If it lapses
Access to the licensed parts stops and nothing is deleted. Members keep their accounts, their papers and their records, every delegation record already exported is a file they hold and can still read with no software present, and anybody may still try an audit the way the public can.
A licence is arranged with you rather than picked off a page. Say what you have in mind, in whatever detail you have it, and we will answer with terms rather than with a brochure.
What your IT office and your DPO will ask
Answered as things stand today, including the answers that are no.
| UK GDPR roles | Not built. For an individual who signs up themselves, PaperAlly is the controller. For an institutional deployment you will require processor terms under Article 28 with a named sub-processor list and a transfer mechanism. Those terms are not published yet, and we will not pretend a draft is a contract. |
|---|---|
| Where the data lives | The application, the database and uploaded files are hosted in the United Kingdom. Only the passage a member chooses to send to an assistant leaves, and that inference happens outside the UK under paid terms that forbid training on the content. Both halves of that sentence are on the trust page, because UK storage on its own would be the kind of half-truth this product exists to argue against. |
| Training on your text | No. The model keys are paid-tier keys, under terms that state the provider does not use prompts or responses to improve its products and does not put them in front of human reviewers. The application refuses to start on unbilled keys, which makes it a property of the software rather than a promise in a brochure. |
| Who owns the drafts | The author. Not us, not the institution, and there is no anonymised derivative carve-out. |
| What a licence gives you sight of | Nothing. An institution licence is an access agreement: it decides who may use the licensed parts of the product, and it grants no view of any member's work. The console shows the same members table, the same counts and the same audit log whether the organisation is licensed or not, and no figure small enough to be one person appears in it either way. |
| Retention | Work done without an account is deleted 30 days after it was last touched. Work inside an account stays until the member deletes it, with a 30-day window in which that can be undone. Consent records are kept six years because they are the proof of what somebody was shown. The mail log is 90 days. |
| Deletion and portability | A member can export everything held about them and delete their account from the account page, without asking anybody, and the deletion returns a confirmation they keep. Export is a standing feature, not a request procedure. |
| Accessibility | The target is WCAG 2.2 Level AA, and the accessibility statement names the gaps we know about rather than claiming conformance. No VPAT. |
| Single sign-on | Partly. OpenID Connect is built and is the path most institutions can offer most easily, Microsoft Entra ID being the common case. Give us your discovery URL and client credentials and your people sign in with their own institutional account. SAML for the UK Access Management Federation is written and our service-provider metadata is published at /auth/saml/metadata, but assertion signatures cannot be verified on our current shared hosting, so we refuse SAML assertions rather than accept one we have not checked. Ask us and we will say where that stands. Sign-in by emailed link remains available and needs no configuration. LTI 1.3 into a virtual learning environment is not built, and neither is roster provisioning: membership comes from an invitation somebody accepts. |
| DPIA support | Partly. You do your own. We can supply the purposes, the data categories, the retention timers, the recipients, the transfer and the security measures, because they are documented. Two questions a DPO will ask are genuinely open and are written down as open: how long guest work should live, and whether an erasure leaves a pseudonymous trace inside a co-author's record. |
| Security assessment | Not built. No penetration test and no certification. We hold none, so we claim none. |
| AI-likelihood scoring | There is none, and there never will be. PaperAlly is not a detector. It cannot tell you whether a passage was written by a machine, it does not estimate it, and no number on any screen can be read that way. |
| If we stop | The standard is published and citable, so a policy that names it does not depend on us. The delegation record exports as a file that stays readable with no software present. That is a better answer than an escrow clause and it is already how the thing is built. |
Not built yet
Listed here rather than left for you to discover, because the alternative is a pilot that dies at procurement and wastes both our time.
- LTI 1.3 into a virtual learning environment, and SAML assertion verification on our current hosting. OpenID Connect single sign-on IS built and working.
- Automatic roster provisioning: members join by accepting an invitation.
- Published Article 28 processor terms and a sub-processor page.
- A security certification or a penetration test.
- Reporting exported for an institution's own dashboards.
Where something is coming, it is described as not built rather than as a date. We would rather be a month late to say yes than a year early to promise it.
Try it before you procure it
Anybody at your institution can check a paper today and read the whole audit without asking us for anything, so the method can be judged before a single conversation happens.
For the console itself, ask us for a pilot licence: set up an organisation, invite two colleagues and a handful of students, and look at what an administrator is actually shown. It takes a few minutes and commits you to nothing.
If you would rather talk it through first, or you need the material for a DPIA, ask. We would rather answer a hard question early than win a pilot that stalls at your data protection office.