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Legal

Acceptable Use Policy

What you may and may not do with the SciNodes services.

Last updated: 15 October 2026

This Acceptable Use Policy ("AUP") forms part of the SciNodes Terms of Use. It applies to everyone who uses the Service. Capitalised terms have the meanings given in the Terms.

1. Research integrity

You must not use the Service to:

  • fabricate or falsify research data, results, citations, references or quotations;
  • present AI-generated citations or findings as verified without checking them against primary sources;
  • engage in plagiarism, ghost-authorship, paper-mill activity or other research misconduct;
  • breach the AI-use, authorship or disclosure rules of your institution, publishers or funders.

2. Lawful and respectful use

You must not use the Service to create, upload, store or share content that:

  • is unlawful, or that facilitates unlawful activity;
  • infringes copyright, trade marks, database rights or other intellectual property. This includes uploading or sharing works that you have no right to use, or redistributing paywalled full texts through project sharing to people who are not entitled to access them;
  • is defamatory, harassing, threatening, hateful or discriminatory;
  • sexually exploits or endangers children, or is otherwise obscene;
  • breaches confidentiality or privacy, or contains another person's personal data without a lawful basis;
  • contains special-category or sensitive personal data, such as health, genetic, biometric or ethnicity data in research datasets, unless you have a lawful basis, the necessary ethics approvals and appropriate safeguards, such as pseudonymisation.

3. AI features

You must not:

  • use AI features to generate content that violates the usage policies of our AI model providers. Such content includes:
    • weapons development, including chemical, biological, radiological and nuclear weapons;
    • malware;
    • targeted harassment;
    • disinformation campaigns;
    • content sexualising minors;
  • attempt prompt injection, jailbreaking, or extraction of system prompts, model weights or other users' data;
  • use AI outputs to develop models that compete with the Service, except as permitted by law;
  • rely on AI outputs for medical, clinical, legal or safety-critical decisions without independent professional verification.

4. Security and integrity of the Service

You must not:

  • access, or attempt to access, accounts, projects or data that you are not authorised to access;
  • probe, scan or test the vulnerability of the Service without our prior written permission. Please report vulnerabilities responsibly to security@scinodes.com;
  • introduce malware, or interfere with or disrupt the Service, including by placing excessive load on it;
  • reverse-engineer, decompile or disassemble the Service, except where the law allows this;
  • bypass authentication, rate limits or other technical controls.

5. Fair use and limits

You must not:

  • create multiple accounts, or share accounts, in order to get around plan limits or your credit usage allowance;
  • resell, sublicense, rent or provide the Service to third parties without our written agreement;
  • scrape, crawl or extract data from the Service, including SciVerse, by automated means except through APIs or exports we provide for that purpose, and in line with their documented limits;
  • use the Service to build a competing product or dataset.

6. Enforcement

If we reasonably believe you have breached this AUP, we may:

  • remove or disable content;
  • restrict features;
  • suspend or terminate your account;
  • report the matter to the authorities.

We will take into account the severity of the breach and, where appropriate, give you notice and a chance to remedy it first.

7. Reporting

You can report a breach of this AUP to legal@scinodes.com. Users in India may also contact the Grievance Officer named in the Terms of Use.