Terms of Use

Last updated: 15 October 2026

These Terms of Use (the "Terms") govern your access to and use of SciNodes, including the websites, applications, APIs and related services described in Section 2 (together, the "Service"). Please read them carefully. By creating an account, clicking "I agree", or otherwise using the Service, you agree to these Terms. If you do not agree, do not use the Service.

1. Who you are contracting with

The entity you contract with depends on where you are:

Scholaris Labs UK Limited operates the global SciNodes platform and infrastructure. Kopili Technologies Private Limited distributes and operates the Service in India. Scholaris Labs UK Limited and Kopili Technologies Private Limited are together the "Scholaris Labs group". "Scholaris Labs" is a trading name used across the group.

"You" means the individual using the Service. If you use the Service on behalf of a university, institution, company or other organisation (an "Organisation"), "you" also includes that Organisation, and you confirm that you are authorised to bind it to these Terms.

2. The Service

SciNodes is an AI-assisted research platform for literature review and scientometric analysis. The Service includes:

• SciNodes app (app.scinodes.com): research projects, publication corpora, network maps (for example co-authorship, co-citation, bibliographic coupling and term co-occurrence maps), the work desk, the AI research assistant, notes, the PDF reader and annotations, research objects and project sharing;
• SciVerse (sciverse.scinodes.com): public discovery of scholarly publications, authors and venues, available with or without an account;
• SciNodes Academy (academy.scinodes.com), Docs (docs.scinodes.com) and Support (support.scinodes.com);
• the marketing site (www.scinodes.com), any regional mirrors (such as *.scinodes.in), and the APIs and back-end services that power the above.

Some features may be labelled "beta", "preview" or "experimental". These are provided as-is, may change or be withdrawn at any time, and may be less reliable than the rest of the Service.

3. Additional policies

The following documents form part of these Terms and are incorporated by reference:

• Privacy Policy: how we handle personal data;
• Cookie Policy;
• Acceptable Use Policy;
• Sub-processor List;
• the Data Processing Addendum, where you are an Organisation that uses the Service to process personal data on its own behalf.

If these Terms conflict with a signed order form or a separate written agreement with an Organisation, that agreement prevails to the extent of the conflict.

4. Eligibility and age

4.1 Minimum age. You must be at least 13 years old to use the Service.

4.2 Users under 18. If you are under 18, or under the age of digital consent where you live (for example 16 in some EU member states), you may use the Service only with the consent and supervision of a parent or legal guardian. That parent or guardian must agree to these Terms on your behalf and is responsible for your use of the Service.

4.3 India. If you are in India and under 18, we will obtain verifiable consent from your parent or lawful guardian, as required by the Digital Personal Data Protection Act, 2023, before we process your personal data. Until we have that consent, we may limit or decline your access.

4.4 Restricted persons. You may not use the Service if you are barred from doing so under applicable law, including sanctions and export-control laws (see Section 22).

5. Accounts

5.1 Registration. You can create an account with an email address and password, or by signing in with a supported identity provider (currently Google and Microsoft). You must give accurate information and keep it up to date.

5.2 Affiliation. We may infer your institutional affiliation from your email domain, for example by matching it to the Research Organization Registry (ROR), and show it in your profile. You can correct or remove an inferred affiliation in your account settings.

5.3 Security. You are responsible for keeping your credentials confidential and for all activity under your account. You must not share your account. Tell us promptly at support@scinodes.com if you suspect unauthorised access.

5.4 Single sign-on. When you sign in, a session may be shared across SciNodes subdomains so that you do not need to sign in to each product separately. See the Cookie Policy.

6. Plans, billing and usage limits

6.1 Plans. We offer paid subscription plans (currently Economy, Base and Power). The pricing page sets out each plan's features, limits and price at any given time.

6.2 AI usage allowance. Each plan includes a weekly AI usage allowance, measured in tokens processed by the AI features. The allowance resets each week. Unused allowance does not roll over and has no cash value. When you reach your allowance, AI features may be paused until the next reset unless you upgrade. Plans may also include limits on projects, storage or other resources.

6.3 Payment processors. We take payments through third-party processors: Stripe for payments outside India and Razorpay for payments in India. We do not store your full card details. Your payment is also subject to the processor's terms.

6.4 Automatic renewal. Paid subscriptions renew automatically at the end of each billing period (monthly or yearly) at the then-current price, unless you cancel before the renewal date. Where required by law, we will remind you before a renewal.

6.5 Changing plans. When you upgrade, the change applies immediately and we charge the prorated difference. When you downgrade, the change applies from the next billing period. If you are over the new plan's limits, the affected items, such as projects above the limit, become read-only until you are within the limits again. We will not delete them because of a downgrade.

6.6 Cancellation. You can cancel at any time in your account's subscription settings. Cancellation takes effect at the end of the current billing period. You keep access to the Service until then.

6.7 Price changes. We may change prices. We will give you at least 30 days' notice before a price increase affects your subscription. If you do not agree, you may cancel before the increase takes effect.

6.8 Taxes. Prices may exclude taxes, such as VAT or GST. Where applicable, we will add them and show them at checkout.

6.9 Failed payments. If a payment fails, we may retry it, and may suspend your access to the Service until the payment succeeds.

7. Refunds and your right to cancel

7.1 General rule. Except as set out in this Section or as required by law, payments are non-refundable, and we do not give refunds or credits for partial periods or unused allowance.

7.2 UK and EU consumers: 14-day cooling-off period. If you are a consumer in the United Kingdom or the European Economic Area, you may cancel a new paid subscription within 14 days of purchase. If you asked us to start providing the paid service during those 14 days, we will refund you minus a proportionate amount for the service provided up to the point you told us you were cancelling. To cancel, use the subscription settings or contact support@scinodes.com.

7.3 Other mandatory rights. Nothing in these Terms limits any refund or other right you have under mandatory consumer law where you live, including the Consumer Rights Act 2015 (UK) and the Consumer Protection Act, 2019 (India).

8. Your content

8.1 What counts as Your Content. "Your Content" means everything you or your collaborators upload, submit or create in the Service. This includes PDFs, reference files (for example RIS, BibTeX, NBIB, ENW, CSV and XLSX), notes, annotations, highlights, research objects, project structures, chat messages and prompts, and the outputs the Service generates for you.

8.2 You own Your Content. As between you and us, you keep all rights in Your Content. To the extent we have any rights in AI outputs generated for you, we assign them to you, subject to Section 9 and the rights of third parties.

8.3 Licence to us. You grant the Scholaris Labs group a worldwide, non-exclusive, royalty-free licence to host, store, copy, process, transmit, display and adapt Your Content to:

• (a) operate, provide, secure and support the Service for you and the collaborators you share with;
• (b) create de-identified and aggregated data from Your Content and usage, and use that data to improve, develop and evaluate the Service, including our own models. The Privacy Policy explains this further, and you can opt out at any time in your account settings.

This licence ends when Your Content is deleted from the Service, except for (i) copies kept for the periods set out in the Privacy Policy, such as backups, and (ii) de-identified or aggregated data that no longer identifies you or Your Content.

8.4 Your responsibility. You confirm that you have all rights, licences and permissions needed to upload Your Content and to let us process it as these Terms describe. This includes copyright in PDFs and other works you upload, and a lawful basis for any personal data about other people that Your Content contains. Do not upload sensitive personal data, such as health data in research datasets, unless you have the necessary legal basis and safeguards.

8.5 Shared processing caches. To make the Service efficient, we may cache derived data, such as extracted text from identical files, term definitions and translations of published works, and reuse it to serve other users. Cached data is keyed to the content itself, not to you. We never disclose to other users that you uploaded a particular file, and we never make your private notes, annotations, chats or projects available to anyone you have not shared them with.

8.6 Project sharing. You can share a project with other users as an editor or viewer. Collaborators you invite can see and, as editors, change the shared project's content. You are responsible for whom you share with. The project owner can remove collaborators at any time.

8.7 Backups are your responsibility. We take reasonable steps to protect Your Content, but you should keep your own copies of important material. You can export your data at any time (see Section 14.4).

9. AI features

9.1 How they work. The AI research assistant, term explanations, translations, summaries, PDF-to-Markdown conversion and other AI features are powered by large language models. These may be provided by third parties (see the Sub-processor List) or developed by us.

9.2 Outputs may be wrong. AI outputs are generated automatically. They may be inaccurate, incomplete, out of date, biased or fabricated, including invented citations, quotations or findings. Outputs are not peer-reviewed. You must check them against primary sources before you rely on them.

9.3 No professional advice. AI outputs are not medical, legal, financial, clinical or other professional advice.

9.4 Academic integrity. You are responsible for complying with the academic-integrity, authorship and AI-disclosure policies of your institution, publishers, funders and journals, including how you acknowledge AI assistance in your work.

9.5 Similar outputs. Because of how AI models work, other users may receive outputs that are the same as or similar to yours. Your rights in an output do not extend to identical or similar outputs generated for others.

9.6 No training by AI providers. Our agreements with third-party AI providers do not let them use the content we send to train their models.

10. Scholarly data, third-party content and copyright

10.1 Bibliographic data. The Service displays publication metadata from open scholarly sources, including OpenAlex, Crossref, ROR and DOI registration agencies, and analyses derived from it. That data is provided under its sources' licences. It may contain errors, and we do not guarantee that it is complete or accurate.

10.2 Full texts. Where the Service fetches a publication's full text for you, it does so only from openly accessible locations, in line with publishers' robots directives. You are responsible for making sure your use of any full text complies with its licence and with copyright law.

10.3 Third-party services and links. The Service may link to or integrate with third-party websites and services that we do not control. We are not responsible for them, and your use of them is governed by their own terms.

10.4 Copyright complaints. If you believe content on the Service infringes your copyright, send a notice to legal@scinodes.com. It must identify the work, the allegedly infringing material and its location, give your contact details, and include a good-faith statement that the use is not authorised. We will act on valid notices and may remove content and suspend repeat infringers.

11. Acceptable use

You must use the Service in line with our Acceptable Use Policy and all applicable laws. In particular, you must not:

• use the Service unlawfully or to infringe others' rights;
• circumvent usage limits, for example by creating multiple accounts;
• scrape the Service or access it by automated means except through interfaces we provide for that purpose;
• reverse-engineer the Service or attack its security;
• use the Service to fabricate research data or citations.

12. Our intellectual property

The Service, including its software, design, maps, visualisations, models, documentation, Academy content, and the SciNodes and Scholaris Labs names and logos, is owned by the Scholaris Labs group or its licensors and is protected by intellectual property laws. Subject to these Terms, we grant you a limited, personal, non-exclusive, non-transferable, revocable licence to use the Service for your own research, teaching and learning. You may use map images and citations you export from the Service in your own publications and presentations. All rights not expressly granted are reserved.

Feedback. If you give us suggestions or feedback, we may use them without restriction or obligation to you.

13. Changes to the Service

We continually improve the Service. We may add, change or remove features, change AI models or providers, or change plan limits. If a change materially reduces the paid features you have already paid for, we will tell you in advance where reasonably possible. If you are adversely affected, you may cancel and receive a prorated refund for the unused part of your prepaid period.

14. Suspension and termination

14.1 By you. You may stop using the Service at any time. You can delete your account in your account settings.

14.2 By us. We may suspend or terminate your access, in whole or in part, if:

• (a) you materially or repeatedly breach these Terms or the Acceptable Use Policy;
• (b) we must do so to comply with law or a lawful request;
• (c) your use creates a security, legal or operational risk to us or others.

Where reasonable, we will give you notice and an opportunity to fix the issue first.

14.3 Discontinuation. If we discontinue the Service entirely, we will give you at least 60 days' notice and refund any prepaid fees for the period after discontinuation.

14.4 Export and deletion. You can export your data with the in-product export tools at any time while your account is active. After your account is terminated or deleted, your content is deleted in line with the retention periods in the Privacy Policy. Where we terminate for reasons other than your breach, you will have at least 30 days to export your data.

14.5 Survival. Sections 8.3(b), 8.4, 10, 12 and 16 to 24 survive termination.

15. Changes to these Terms

We may update these Terms from time to time. If a change is material, we will notify you at least 30 days before it takes effect, by email or in the Service. Changes required by law, or that concern new features, may take effect sooner. If you continue to use the Service after a change takes effect, you accept the updated Terms. If you do not agree, you may stop using the Service and delete your account before the change takes effect.

16. Disclaimers

To the maximum extent permitted by law, the Service, including all AI outputs, bibliographic data and analyses, is provided "as is" and "as available". We disclaim all warranties, express or implied, including warranties of merchantability, fitness for a particular purpose, accuracy and non-infringement. We do not warrant that the Service will be uninterrupted, error-free or secure, or that analyses or AI outputs will be correct.

If you are a consumer: this Section does not affect your statutory rights. In the UK this includes the Consumer Rights Act 2015 requirement that digital content and services be of satisfactory quality, fit for purpose, as described, and performed with reasonable care and skill.

17. Limitation of liability

17.1 What we do not exclude. Nothing in these Terms excludes or limits liability for death or personal injury caused by negligence, for fraud or fraudulent misrepresentation, or for any other liability that cannot be excluded or limited by law.

17.2 Excluded losses. Subject to 17.1, we are not liable for any indirect, incidental, special, consequential or punitive loss. We are also not liable for any loss of profits, revenue, data, goodwill, research opportunity or anticipated savings, whether in contract, tort (including negligence) or otherwise.

17.3 Cap. Subject to 17.1, our total aggregate liability arising out of or in connection with the Service or these Terms is limited to the greater of (a) the fees you paid us in the 12 months before the event giving rise to the claim and (b) £100 (or the equivalent in local currency).

17.4 Consumers. If you are a consumer, we are responsible for loss or damage you suffer that is a foreseeable result of our breach of these Terms or our failure to use reasonable care and skill. We are not responsible for business losses. We provide the Service for domestic, private, educational and research use.

18. Indemnity

If you use the Service on behalf of an Organisation or for commercial purposes, you will indemnify the Scholaris Labs group against third-party claims, losses and reasonable costs arising from (a) Your Content or (b) your breach of these Terms or the law. This Section does not apply to consumers.

19. Governing law and disputes

19.1 Users outside India. These Terms, and any dispute or claim arising out of or in connection with them (including non-contractual disputes), are governed by the laws of England and Wales. The courts of England and Wales have exclusive jurisdiction.

If you are a consumer: you also benefit from the mandatory consumer protections of the country where you live, and you may bring proceedings in your local courts. If you live in Scotland or Northern Ireland, you may bring proceedings in Scotland or Northern Ireland respectively.

19.2 Users in India. These Terms are governed by the laws of India. Any dispute arising out of or in connection with them is finally resolved by arbitration under the Arbitration and Conciliation Act, 1996, by a sole arbitrator appointed by mutual agreement. The seat and venue of arbitration is Guwahati, Assam, and the proceedings are conducted in English. Subject to this, the courts at Guwahati have exclusive jurisdiction. This does not affect your right to approach a consumer commission under the Consumer Protection Act, 2019.

19.3 Informal resolution first. Before starting formal proceedings, please contact us at legal@scinodes.com so that we can try to resolve the dispute informally within 30 days.

20. Organisations and institutional use

If an Organisation licenses the Service for its members, the Organisation's agreement with us governs that licence. The Organisation may be able to administer, access or remove its members' accounts and content, as that agreement describes. Where we process personal data on an Organisation's behalf, the Data Processing Addendum applies.

21. India: intermediary provisions and grievance officer

For users in India, Kopili Technologies Private Limited has appointed a Grievance Officer in line with the Information Technology Act, 2000, the rules made under it, and the Digital Personal Data Protection Act, 2023:

• Email: grievance@scinodes.com
• Address: 179, Nahar Path, Saurav Nagar, Guwahati, Kamrup, Assam 781028, India

The Grievance Officer will acknowledge complaints within 24 hours and resolve them within the period prescribed by applicable law.

22. Export controls and sanctions

You must comply with all applicable export-control and sanctions laws. You confirm that you are not located in, and are not acting on behalf of any person located in, a comprehensively sanctioned country or territory, and that you are not a sanctioned person.

23. General

• Entire agreement. These Terms and the documents referred to in them are the entire agreement between you and us about the Service.
• Assignment. You may not transfer your rights under these Terms. We may transfer ours to another member of the Scholaris Labs group, or in connection with a merger, acquisition or sale of assets. If you are a consumer, we will make sure such a transfer does not reduce your rights.
• Severability. If any provision is held invalid, the rest remain in effect.
• No waiver. If we delay or fail to enforce a provision, that is not a waiver.
• Force majeure. We are not liable for failures caused by events beyond our reasonable control.
• Third-party rights. No one other than you and us has any right to enforce these Terms, including under the Contracts (Rights of Third Parties) Act 1999. The exception is members of the Scholaris Labs group, which may rely on Sections 8.3, 12 and 16 to 18.
• Language. These Terms are written in English. Any translation is provided for convenience only.
• Notices. We may send you notices by email to the address on your account or within the Service. You can send notices to us at legal@scinodes.com.

24. Contact

• General and support: support@scinodes.com
• Legal notices: legal@scinodes.com
• Scholaris Labs UK Limited: 2nd Floor College House, 17 King Edwards Road, Ruislip, London, United Kingdom, HA4 7AE
• Kopili Technologies Private Limited: 179, Nahar Path, Saurav Nagar, Guwahati, Kamrup, Assam 781028, India