Terms of Use

Agreement to these Terms

These Terms of Use ("Terms") are an agreement between you and Scholar Chat ("we", "us", "Scholar Chat"). They govern your access to and use of the Scholar Chat website, messaging service, researcher directory and everything we offer through them (together, the "Service").

By ticking the box at the end of this page, or by continuing to use the Service after agreeing, you confirm that you have read these Terms, that you understand them, and that you accept them in full. If you do not agree, do not use the Service — you may simply close this page, and the account created when you signed in with ORCID will hold nothing but your verified iD.

The Privacy Policy is a separate document. It is a notice rather than a contract: it describes what we collect, why, who else sees it and how long we keep it. You are not asked to "agree" to it, only to have read it, and we may update it without re-opening this agreement.

We record the date and time you agree and the version of these Terms you agreed to. If we publish a materially revised version, you will be asked to read and agree again before you can continue using the Service — see section 18.

Who may use Scholar Chat

Scholar Chat is a professional messaging service for the research community. You may use it only if all of the following are true:

• You are at least 18 years old, or the age of majority where you live if that is higher.
• You hold a genuine ORCID iD that belongs to you personally, and you sign in with it yourself.
• You are using the Service in a research, academic or professional capacity.
• You have the legal capacity to enter into a binding agreement, and you are not barred from using the Service under any applicable law or sanctions regime.
• Your access has not previously been terminated by us for breach of these Terms.

The Service is offered to individual researchers. If you use it on behalf of an institution, you confirm you are authorised to accept these Terms for that institution, and references to "you" include it.

Your ORCID iD and your account

Your identity here rests on ORCID. When you sign in, ORCID authenticates the holder of an ORCID account and returns the iD associated with it, together with whatever that ORCID record makes public — typically a name, and sometimes an affiliation. We never see your ORCID password.

What that establishes, and what it does not. It establishes that whoever signed in controls that ORCID account. It does not independently verify your legal identity, your employment, your credentials, your affiliation or the accuracy of your publication record — neither we nor ORCID verify those, and you should not treat an iD shown here as proof of them.

Your ORCID iD is permanently attached to your Scholar Chat account and cannot be changed from within the Service, because it is what allows another researcher to know they are writing to the same person each time. You are responsible for everything done through your account, so you must:

• keep your ORCID credentials secure and never let anybody else sign in as you;
• sign out on devices that are shared or that you no longer control;
• tell us promptly, at the contact address published on this site, if you believe your account has been accessed by somebody else.

Signing in with an ORCID account that is not yours, or holding yourself out as a researcher you are not, is a serious breach of these Terms and of ORCID's own terms.

Your profile and the researcher directory

Before you can message anyone, you complete a short profile: your name, an email address, your academic title, your research interests, and optionally your institution, website and Google Scholar iD, along with a profile picture if you upload one.

Your profile is visible to every other signed-in researcher on Scholar Chat. That is its purpose — it is how a colleague finds you in the directory and decides whether to write to you. Do not put anything in your profile that you would not want the whole directory to see. Your email address is used to reach you about the Service and is not published as part of your directory card, but your name, title, institution, interests, links, ORCID iD and picture are.

Everything in your profile must be accurate and kept up to date. You can edit it at any time from your profile page. Profile pictures are served as ordinary web images and should be treated as public.

Messaging and conversations

Scholar Chat carries one-to-one conversations between researchers. A few things about how messages behave here are worth knowing before you write one:

• Editing. You can correct a message you sent for up to 15 minutes. An edited message is marked as edited, so the person reading it can see that it changed.
• Unsending. You can delete a message you sent for up to 48 hours after sending it. Doing so clears the text from the conversation for both of you and leaves a note that a message was deleted. It does not recall what the other person has already read, copied, screenshotted or forwarded.
• Delivery and read status. The Service shows when a message has been delivered and read, and when the other person is typing. Both of you see this about each other.
• No guarantee of delivery. Messages depend on networks and services we do not control. Do not rely on Scholar Chat for anything urgent, safety-critical, or where a missed message would cause harm.

Deleting a message removes it from the conversation. It does not remove every copy of it everywhere at once — see section 13 and the Privacy Policy.

Acceptable use — Prohibited Conduct

Scholar Chat exists so that researchers can talk to each other in confidence and in good faith. The list below is what these Terms mean by "Prohibited Conduct" — the phrase is used in sections 13, 14 and 21 so that our powers rest on something defined rather than on how unethical something feels. You agree not to use the Service to do, attempt, encourage or enable any of it:

• Harassment and abuse — bullying, stalking, intimidation, threats, sustained unwanted contact, hate speech, or content that demeans a person or group on the basis of race, ethnicity, caste, religion, sex, gender, sexual orientation, disability, nationality or any similar characteristic.
• Sexual exploitation — sexual content involving minors in any form, or any non-consensual, coercive or exploitative sexual content. Material of this kind is reported to the appropriate authorities.
• Illegal activity — trafficking, terrorism or its financing, laundering, the sale of controlled substances, weapons or stolen data, fraud, extortion, or any other criminal conduct under the laws that apply to you or to us.
• Deception — impersonating any person or institution, misrepresenting your credentials, affiliation or authorship, phishing, or any scheme designed to obtain money, data, credentials or research material by deceit.
• Research misconduct — soliciting or arranging plagiarism, ghost-authorship for sale, data fabrication or falsification, paper-mill activity, citation manipulation, manipulation of peer review, or the sale of authorship positions.
• Breach of confidence — sharing confidential manuscripts, peer-review material, unpublished data, patient or participant data, personal data, or anything covered by an ethics approval, a non-disclosure agreement or an export-control restriction, without the authority to share it.
• Infringement — sending material that infringes copyright, trade marks, patents, trade secrets or any other right of a third party.
• Spam and unsolicited promotion — bulk or repetitive messaging, predatory journal or conference solicitation, advertising, chain messages, or scraping the directory to build a mailing list.
• Malware and technical attack — sending viruses or malicious code; probing, scanning or testing the security of the Service; circumventing authentication, rate limits or access controls; reverse engineering the Service; overloading our infrastructure; or using bots, scrapers or automated tools against the Service without our written permission.
• Misuse of other people's data — collecting, storing, publishing or reselling other researchers' details from the directory or from your conversations for any purpose they have not agreed to.

You are also responsible for complying with the rules of your own institution, funder and ethics committee when you use the Service.

Two different powers follow from this section, and they are deliberately kept apart. Enforcement is what we can do on our own account — investigate a report, remove content, restrict or close an account (sections 13 and 14). Disclosure is handing material to somebody outside, and that happens only on the grounds in section 21. Breaching this section does not by itself send anything to an authority.

Files you share

You can share files inside a conversation, within the size and type limits the Service enforces at the time. Shared files are stored privately: they are never served from a public URL and can only be fetched by a signed-in participant in the conversation they belong to. Unlike message text, they are not encrypted at rest — see section 10.

You are responsible for what you upload. Do not share files you have no right to share, files containing personal or sensitive data you are not authorised to disclose, or files containing malicious code. We may remove a file, without notice, where we reasonably believe it breaches these Terms or the law.

Scholar Chat is not a backup service or a data repository. Keep your own copies of anything that matters — we do not guarantee that a file shared here will remain available.

Your content and the rights in it

What you write and share stays yours. We claim no ownership of your messages, your files, your profile text or your research.

To be able to run the Service, we need your permission to handle that content in the ordinary technical ways: to store it, encrypt it, transmit it to the person you sent it to, back it up, display it to you and to your correspondent, and process it as needed to keep the Service working and secure. You therefore grant us a limited, worldwide, non-exclusive, royalty-free licence to do exactly that, for as long as the content is on the Service and for no other purpose. This licence does not let us publish your content, sell it, use it to advertise, or use it to train machine-learning models.

You confirm that you have the rights necessary to share what you share, and that doing so does not breach anybody else's rights or any obligation you are under.

The Service itself — the software, design, text and marks — belongs to us or our licensors. These Terms give you permission to use it, and nothing more.

Your data, and the Privacy Policy

What we collect, why we hold it, who else can see it, how long we keep it and what you can ask us to do about it are all set out in the Privacy Policy, version 1.0. It is a separate document because a data-protection notice has to be readable by somebody who has not signed anything, and updateable without reopening this agreement. Please read it — the gate asks you to confirm that you have.

In outline: we hold your ORCID identity, your profile, your conversations and files, your encryption keys, and technical records such as sign-in times and server logs. We do not sell personal data, we do not advertise to you, and we do not use your messages to train models.

Data-protection requests go to the contact address published on this site.

Security and encryption — what we do and do not promise

We take reasonable technical and organisational measures to protect the Service. Rather than summarise them favourably, here is what is actually true of the system you are agreeing to use:

• Message text is encrypted in your browser with AES-256-GCM, under a key agreed with your correspondent using ECDH on the P-256 curve, and is stored on our servers as ciphertext.
• Both halves of your key pair are held on our servers, so that your conversations open on every device you sign in from. This is client-side encryption with escrowed keys — it is not end-to-end encryption, and we are technically capable of decrypting your messages.
• Files you share are stored unencrypted outside the web root, reachable only through an endpoint that checks your session and your part in the conversation.
• Traffic is encrypted in transit wherever the Service is reached over HTTPS, as it is on our production domain.
• The plain text of messages you send is also kept in your own browser's local storage, so that you can read back what you wrote. On a shared or public computer, clear your browser data as well as signing out.

We do not routinely read conversations, and we restrict access to message content to what is necessary to operate the Service, to investigate Prohibited Conduct under section 6, or to meet an obligation described in section 21.

No online service is perfectly secure. Do not use Scholar Chat for material whose disclosure would be seriously harmful — classified information, sensitive patient or participant data beyond what your ethics approval permits, or anything requiring guaranteed end-to-end confidentiality. Use a system designed for that purpose instead.

Notifications and email

We use the email address in your profile to send you service messages: a welcome message when you join, security and account notices, and information about material changes to these Terms. These are part of the Service and cannot be switched off while your account is open.

You must give an address you actually control and can receive mail at. It is how your account is recovered and how we reach you if something is wrong.

Availability and changes to the service

We aim to keep the Service running, but we do not promise it will be uninterrupted or error-free. We may modify, suspend or withdraw any part of it, and may impose or change limits — on message rates, file sizes, storage or anything else — at any time.

Where a change materially reduces what the Service does, we will give reasonable notice unless the change is needed urgently for security, legal or safety reasons.

Deactivation, deletion and termination

Four different things get called "deleting", and it matters which one is meant:

• Unsending a message. Within 48 hours of sending it, the text is cleared from the conversation for both of you. A marker that a message existed and was deleted remains, and anything already read, copied or saved by the other person is beyond recall.
• Deactivating your account. Reversible. You leave the directory and cannot be messaged; your data is retained so that signing in again with the same ORCID iD brings the account back.
• Erasing your account. Requested at the contact address published on this site. Your profile, keys and remaining content are erased or anonymised within 30 days. Messages you already sent stay visible to the person who received them: a conversation belongs to both of you, and we will not rewrite somebody else's record of what was said to them.
• Backups and legal holds. Erasure applies to live systems immediately and to backups as they expire, within 35 days. Material we are under a duty to preserve is held until that duty ends, whatever else has been deleted.

When we may suspend or terminate your access

With notice where it is practical to give it, and without notice where it is not, if we reasonably believe that:

• you have engaged in Prohibited Conduct as defined in section 6;
• your account is being used unlawfully, or to harm another person;
• the ORCID account you signed in with is not yours, or your identity or credentials are misrepresented;
• we are required to act by law, by a court, or by a competent authority;
• continuing to provide the Service to you would expose us, another user or a third party to legal liability or to a security risk.

Where an account is restricted or terminated over suspected unlawful conduct, we may retain its data — including message content — for as long as is necessary for the investigation, for our legal defence, or to comply with a preservation obligation. Sections 8, 9, 16, 17, 19 and 21 survive the end of this agreement.

Reporting abuse and raising a complaint

If somebody is harassing you, misrepresenting who they are, sending unlawful material, or otherwise engaging in Prohibited Conduct, tell us at the contact address published on this site. Include the ORCID iD or profile of the account concerned, what happened, and when — and keep your own copies of anything relevant, because deletion by the other person may remove it from your view.

We acknowledge reports and investigate them proportionately. Depending on what we find we may warn, restrict, suspend or terminate an account and remove content. Where we consider the conduct may be criminal, or where a safety ground in section 21 applies, we may also refer the matter to the appropriate authority — the decision is ours to make on the facts, and reporting something to us is not itself a report to the police.

Complaints about how we have handled your data or your account go to the contact address published on this site. We will respond within the time required by applicable law.

ORCID and other third-party services

Signing in uses ORCID, an independent organisation with its own terms and privacy policy. What ORCID shares with us depends on the visibility settings on your own ORCID record and on the permission you grant when you authorise Scholar Chat. We are not responsible for ORCID's service, and an interruption there may prevent sign-in here.

The Service also relies on ordinary infrastructure providers — hosting, email delivery, and a web font served by Google — who process data on our instructions or, in the case of fonts, receive the request your browser makes. They are listed in the Privacy Policy. Links to external sites shared in conversations or in profiles are not endorsements, and we are not responsible for what is on the other side of them.

Disclaimers and limitation of liability

The Service is provided "as is" and "as available". To the fullest extent permitted by law, we exclude all warranties, conditions and representations that are not expressly set out in these Terms — including any implied warranty of merchantability, fitness for a particular purpose, accuracy, or non-infringement.

We are not a party to your conversations. Beyond authenticating an ORCID account as described in section 3, we do not verify anybody's identity, credentials, affiliation or publication record, we do not check the accuracy of what a user tells you, and we are not responsible for what other users do.

To the fullest extent permitted by law, we are not liable for indirect, incidental, special, consequential or punitive damages, nor for loss of data, loss of research, loss of profit, loss of opportunity or reputational harm arising from your use of, or inability to use, the Service.

Where liability cannot lawfully be excluded, our total aggregate liability to you for all claims arising in any twelve-month period is limited to the greater of INR 5,000 or the amount you paid us for the Service in that period. The Service is currently provided free of charge, which is why a fixed sum is named rather than a multiple of fees.

Nothing in these Terms limits liability for death or personal injury caused by negligence, for fraud or fraudulent misrepresentation, or for anything else that cannot lawfully be limited. Some jurisdictions do not allow certain exclusions or limitations, so parts of this section may not apply to you; the rest continues to apply so far as the law permits. If you are a consumer, your mandatory rights under the consumer law of the country you live in are unaffected.

Indemnity

You agree to indemnify and hold us harmless against third-party claims, losses, liabilities and reasonable costs (including legal fees) arising from your breach of these Terms, your misuse of the Service, your content, or your infringement of anybody else's rights. This does not apply to the extent the claim arises from our own breach, negligence or wrongdoing, and it does not apply to you as a consumer where the law of your country says otherwise.

Changes to these Terms

We may revise these Terms as the Service develops or as the law requires. Every version carries a version number and an effective date, both shown at the top of this page.

When we make a material change, we publish the new version and ask you to read and agree to it the next time you use the Service; until you do, you will not be able to continue past this page. Minor corrections that do not change your rights or obligations may be made without a new agreement. Continuing to use the Service after a change takes effect means you accept it. If you do not accept a revision, your remedy is to stop using the Service and close your account.

Governing law and disputes

These Terms, and any dispute arising out of them or out of your use of the Service, are governed by the laws of India, without regard to its conflict of laws rules. You and we submit to the exclusive jurisdiction of the courts of competent jurisdiction in India, except that we may seek injunctive relief in any court of competent jurisdiction to protect the Service or our rights.

Before starting proceedings, please write to the contact address published on this site and give us 30 days to resolve the matter; most disputes end there.

If any provision of these Terms is held unenforceable, it is severed and the rest continues in force. Our not enforcing a provision on one occasion is not a waiver of it. These Terms and the Privacy Policy are the whole agreement between us about the Service. Nothing here removes a mandatory protection given to you by the law of the country you live in.

How to contact us

Legal notices and questions about these Terms: the contact address published on this site.

Data-protection requests and complaints: the contact address published on this site.

Abuse reports: the contact address published on this site.