What Terms Govern Use of This Academic Research Site?

Last updated: October 10, 2024

These terms set the boundaries between what we provide and what we ask of you in return. They are not decoration. When a dispute lands on a researcher's desk, the wording below is what gets read, so we have tried to keep it readable the first time through.

Acceptance of Terms

Using this site means you accept these terms. That applies whether you arrive to read a single publication, register for an event, or contribute material to one of our resource collections. There is no separate sign-up step that triggers agreement—the act of using the site is the agreement.

If any part of these terms does not work for you, the remedy is straightforward: do not use the site. We would rather you walk away than rely on services under conditions you have not accepted.

Acceptable Use Policy

Most of what we ask is what any scholarly community would expect. Submit information that is accurate and honest. If you register for a conference under a false affiliation or upload a dataset you have misrepresented, you have broken these terms regardless of intent.

Beyond accuracy, three categories of behaviour are off-limits:

• Interfering with the site's security, availability, or normal operation—including automated scraping that degrades performance for others.
• Attempting to access accounts, restricted areas, or systems you have no permission to reach.
• Any activity that is unlawful, abusive, or designed to harass other members.

The line we care about is harm. A graduate student running a few queries to support a literature review is using the site as intended. A bot hammering the publications archive at machine speed is not.

Content Use and Licensing

You may use site content for personal, non-commercial purposes. Read it, cite it, teach from it, build on it in your own scholarship. What you may not do is redistribute or republish our material—wholesale or in substantial part, without written permission.

This matters more on a research site than on a typical page. Much of what you find here belongs to its authors, contributing institutions, or licensors, not to the association in any unrestricted sense. We display it under arrangements that often carry their own conditions. When you reuse a figure or a full text beyond fair-dealing norms, you are reaching past our permission into theirs.

Intellectual property in the site's own design, structure, and original editorial material remains with the association or its licensors. Nothing in these terms transfers ownership to you.

No Warranties and Disclaimers

We provide the site and its content on an "as available" basis. That phrase does real work: it means we make the material accessible without promising it will be complete, current, or free of error at any given moment.

Academic content ages. A methodology described in a 2019 paper may have been superseded; a dataset may carry corrections we have not yet propagated. We do not guarantee the accuracy or reliability of everything published here, and we expect readers to apply the same critical judgment they would bring to any source.

Where a decision carries professional, legal, financial, or clinical weight, treat this site as a starting point rather than an authority. Seek qualified independent advice before you act. One honest caveat specific to this material: research summaries here are curated by volunteers and staff with subject expertise, but they are not a substitute for the peer-reviewed primary sources they point to.

Limitation of Liability

To the fullest extent the law allows, the association is not liable for damages arising from your use of—or inability to use, this site. This includes indirect, incidental, and consequential losses: lost data, lost opportunity, downstream costs that flow from relying on something you read here.

Some jurisdictions limit how far these exclusions can reach, particularly where consumer protection rules apply. Where local law overrides part of this clause, the rest still stands, and our liability is capped at the minimum that law permits.

Applicable Law and Disputes

These terms are interpreted under the laws of the jurisdiction in which the association operates. Any dispute that cannot be resolved directly falls to the competent local courts there.

The terms are also severable. If a court finds one provision unenforceable, that provision is set aside and the remainder continues to apply unchanged. A single weak clause does not collapse the whole agreement.

Changes to These Terms

We revise these terms from time to time—when our services change, when the law shifts, or when something here proves unclear in practice. The revision date at the top of the page tells you which version is current.

Continuing to use the site after we post an update means you accept the revised terms. We do not send individual notices for routine changes, so checking the date when you return matters if these conditions affect how you work.

Questions about anything written here are welcome. Reach us through the Contact page, and a related document, the Privacy Policy, explains how we handle the information you share.