This page describes who maintains Heavy Metal Index, how the index is governed, and the firewall between the index and the Paleo Foundation’s Heavy Metal Tested & Certified (HMT&C) certification program. It is one of two pages a sophisticated reader is expected to consult before relying on the index for regulatory, legal, or commercial purposes; the other is methodology.
This page is a stub and will be expanded. The governance posture below is not aspirational; it is the working policy under which the index is being built. Sections marked stub will be expanded with names, dates, and procedural detail before the index transitions out of preview.
Operator
Heavy Metal Index is operated by the Paleo Foundation, a non-profit entity registered in Cyprus. The Foundation also operates the Heavy Metal Tested & Certified (HMT&C) program at heavymetaltested.com, which is a separately branded certification program for consumer products tested against thresholds for lead, cadmium, arsenic, mercury, and related elements. The program itself is described at heavy-metal-tested-certified.
The Foundation’s operation of both projects is disclosed openly on every page of this index, in the site header, and is the central governance question this page exists to address. The remainder of this document describes how the two projects are kept editorially distinct.
Editorial firewall
The wiki and HMT&C operate in different epistemic registers, by design.
The wiki reports what the peer-reviewed and regulatory literature supports. It does not advocate, market, harmonize with HMT&C thresholds, or soften claims to make HMT&C look stronger. HMT&C sets certification thresholds that may be tighter than the literature floor for precautionary, market-ratcheting, feasibility-driven, or regulatory-alignment reasons. When HMT&C thresholds differ from the literature baseline, the rationale is named in HMT&C documentation; the gap is not hidden.
The firewall is enforced in three concrete ways.
First, one-way linking. HMT&C documentation may cite wiki entries as the literature baseline for its threshold rationale. Wiki entries do not endorse, mention, or rank HMT&C-certified brands, do not link to the HMT&C program from page bodies, and do not present certification status as evidence of safety.
Second, architectural separation. The wiki lives at heavymetalindex.com. The certification program lives at heavymetaltested.com. The two sites are operated separately and treated as independent properties for legal and editorial purposes. Cross-linking between the two domains exists at the navigational level only.
Third, no brand-level data. Brand-specific lab results, certificates of analysis, and internal test data do not appear in this index. Where third-party testing has produced brand-by-brand contamination data (Consumer Reports, Healthy Babies Bright Futures, and similar), this index summarizes the category-level and ingredient-level signal and links to the source for brand-specific values. Brand-by-brand tables are not reproduced.
Fourth, evidence-state separation. HMT&C thresholds, internal standards candidates, and app-model assumptions are separate claim classes. They may not support public Heavy Metal Index claims. A public claim must trace to literature, regulatory, toxicology, exposure, or occurrence evidence approved for public use.
Fifth, two-stage review. Machine-extracted records can enter internal evidence registers and draft queues, but public pages require approved_for_public values or claims before newly extracted numeric claims are generated into public prose. Internal standards work may use approved_for_internal records, but that approval does not authorize public wiki publication.
Sixth, data gaps stay visible. When the Index has no approved evidence for a metal/product/matrix cell, the correct public state is “Data gap.” The wiki must not imply that missing evidence means a product type is probably clean or low risk.
Curators
The named editorial board and external reviewers are listed at curators.md with their credentials, domain expertise, and conflict-of-interest disclosures. The page is currently in scaffold state — structural slots are in place, named individuals are being filled in as the curatorial board is finalised. See curators for the current composition and the recusal log.
Conflict of interest posture
The principal conflict of interest the Index operates with is the Paleo Foundation’s parallel operation of the Heavy Metal Tested & Certified (HMT&C) certification program at heavymetaltested.com. The architectural firewall between the wiki and HMT&C is described above (Editorial firewall) and enforced in code; the per-curator and per-reviewer disclosures are at curators.
The Foundation’s bar for recusal is low: when in doubt, a curator recuses from substantive review of the page in question and another curator or external reviewer takes it. Recusals are logged per curator in the curators frontmatter and are themselves public.
Errors and corrections
The public errata process is documented at errata.md: submission channel, three-state workflow (acknowledged, substantive review, external review), public log of substantiated corrections. The version history of every page is rendered at the bottom of the page itself (see “Page history” footer) and stored in git as the authoritative record.
Disputes
Substantive disagreements with Index claims flow through the same channel as errata (errata). When a correction is contested, the page can be flagged with a dispute: frontmatter field that renders a visible “Under review” banner; the disposition and resolution are logged at errata alongside applied corrections. The procedure for handling synthesis-claim disputes — where multiple A-tier sources conflict — is documented in methodology § Synthesis and re-synthesis; the contradiction-detection machinery is at tools/build-synthesis-contradictions.mjs and surfaces flagged claims for editorial review.
Governing reference
The internal governance document for this index is maintained at the project root as CLAUDE.md. The policies described on this page are the public restatement of that document; in any conflict between this page and the internal document, the internal document is authoritative and this page will be updated to match.