Copyright

In order to make the Outcomes Star™ widely available and free to download, Triangle Consulting, the creators of the Outcomes Star™ have made all versions of the Star available under a Creative Commons licence – this means that the documents can be downloaded free of charge and may be used in paper version with service users without any payment being made.  The On-line version of all Stars has a license fee to cover hosting, support and other costs. 

Agencies sometimes want to make slight changes to the wording of the Outcomes Star™ or to change some of the scales. While we understand the desire to customise the Star to meet the needs of individual services, wide consultation and discussion has indicated that allowing this would not serve the wider needs of sectors as a whole, for the following reasons:

  • The official versions of the Star have been tested and re-tested many times within their sector to create a tool that is coherent and practical. Changes are often made without a full understanding of the issues that have been considered in ensuring the overall integrity of the tool and therefore undermine the quality of the tool
  • A number of unofficial versions of the Outcomes Star™ in circulation would undermine the credibility of the tool – particularly if some of the versions are of poor quality
  • When clients move to different projects it is confusing if different versions of the same tool are used
  • One of the benefits of the Outcomes Star™ is that all users who use the Star online contribute to the development of a national outcomes evidence base. If there are different versions in circulation then the outcomes measured on each version are not comparable and it is no longer possible to develop an evidence base.


For all of these reasons the making of derivative works of any version of the Outcomes Star is not permitted. The full terms of its publication are as follows:

  • It can be downloaded by any organisation free of charge and can be used in its paper version with service users without any payment being made to Triangle Consulting or its partners
  • It cannot be sold to others or used for commercial purposes by others in any way
  • The making of other versions of the Outcomes Star™ is not permitted except by Triangle Consulting. In particular others are not permitted to:
    • Call a tool they develop the Outcomes Star™ (or any variation on that name - the Outcomes Star™ is a trade-marked name)
    • Use the graphics from any version of the tool including the Star diagram
    • Use the text from the tool, in particular the scale point descriptions
    • Put any part of the tool online or create IT software based on the tool
  • Translations into other languages must be carried out with the permission of Triangle Consulting and any joint copyright holders and following our conditions, requirements and good practice guidelines (download PDF guidelines: Recovery Star, all other versions of the Star). Contact Triangle Consulting if you would like to discuss making a version of the Star available in another language.

However others are permitted to use the principles of the Star to create other tools in the same format as the Outcomes Star™ (i.e. using scales, scale point descriptions and presenting the scores in a circular diagram) as long as they start with a blank sheet of paper and do not use the Star scales

Triangle Consulting is working hard to make official versions of the Star available for client groups. Find out the versions that currently exist and others in development or contact us on  020 7272 8765  or at info@triangleconsulting.co.uk if you would like to discuss collaborating with us to create a new version of the Outcomes Star™.