Terms of Service

Agreeing to these terms

These terms govern your use of Research Monitor, including the website, the app, briefing emails and agent (MCP) access (together, “the service”). “We” and “us” means the operator of Research Monitor. By creating an account or using the service, you agree to these terms and acknowledge our Privacy Policy. If you do not agree, please do not use the service.

If you use Research Monitor on behalf of an organisation, such as a university or company, you confirm that you are authorised to accept these terms for it.

The service

Research Monitor monitors the scientific literature for a set of curated collections. Each night it collects new papers' metadata and abstracts from public sources, including PubMed, bioRxiv, medRxiv, arXiv and OpenAlex. It then uses machine learning models to score, analyse and extract findings from them, and personalises your reading list using the research aim you give us. Features differ by plan and may change over time.

Your account

• You must be at least 16 years old to use Research Monitor. To buy a paid plan, you must also be able to form a binding contract where you live.
• Give accurate information when you sign up, and keep it up to date.
• An account is for one person. Don't share your sign-in details. Plans for several people are offered separately.
• Keep your password and agent keys secure. You are responsible for activity under your account and your keys. Tell us promptly at theonlytoufic@gmail.com if you think someone else has used them.

Acceptable use

You agree not to:

• use the service in a way that breaks the law or infringes anyone's rights, including authors' and publishers' copyright and licence terms;
• scrape, bulk-download or systematically copy content from the service, including through agent access, to build a database, dataset or competing product;
• resell, sublicense or share access to the service, your account or your keys, except as your plan expressly allows;
• get around usage limits, plan restrictions, licence controls or security measures;
• probe or test the service for vulnerabilities, or disrupt it, for example by overloading it or sending malicious code;
• reverse engineer the service, except where the law allows it;
• create accounts by automated means, or impersonate another person;
• enter patient-identifiable data or other sensitive personal data into the research interview, projects, notes or questions. The service is not designed to hold it.

Plans, billing and cancellation

Free plan

The Free plan costs nothing and has the limits described on the pricing page, such as one collection and 200 agent tool calls a month.

Paid plans

Paid plans are billed in advance, monthly or yearly, through Stripe, our payment processor. Card details go to Stripe and are not stored on our servers. When you subscribe, you authorise recurring charges at the then-current price until you cancel. Prices and what each plan includes are shown on the pricing page. Taxes may apply.

Who the Researcher plan is for

The Researcher plan is for students and staff of universities, hospitals and non-profit research institutes, for their research. If you use Research Monitor for a company or other commercial work, choose Pro. We may ask you to confirm that you qualify.

Cancelling

You can cancel at any time from the billing page in your account settings, which opens Stripe's customer portal, or by emailing theonlytoufic@gmail.com. Cancelling stops future renewals. You keep your paid features until the end of the period you have paid for, after which your account moves to the Free plan.

Refunds

Except where the law requires otherwise, payments are non-refundable and we don't give refunds or credits for partly used periods. If you think you were charged in error, email us and we will look into it.

Price changes

We may change our prices. We will tell you at least 30 days before a change affects your subscription, and it will apply from your next billing period. If you don't want to continue at the new price, you can cancel before then.

Publishers' content and licences

Papers belong to their authors and publishers. For most papers, Research Monitor shows bibliographic details, the abstract, findings extracted by our models, and a link to the source.

We show full text and figures only when a paper's licence permits reuse, for example a Creative Commons Attribution (CC BY) licence. We do not redistribute full text without reuse rights.

You must respect publishers' licences and copyright when you read, download, store or share material you find through Research Monitor, including material your agent retrieves. Open licences come with conditions of their own, such as attribution (CC BY) or no derivative works (CC BY-ND).

If you hold rights in material shown on Research Monitor and believe it is being used without permission, email theonlytoufic@gmail.com with the details. We will review it promptly and remove material where appropriate.

Machine-extracted findings are not authoritative

Relevance scores, analyses, extracted findings and claims, summaries, briefings and matches are produced automatically by machine learning models. They can be wrong or incomplete, they can miss caveats that matter, and they can be out of date.

• They are not peer review, and they are not a substitute for reading the paper.
• They are not medical, clinical, legal or investment advice. Do not use them to make decisions about the care of individual patients.
• A match between a paper and your aim reflects how closely they relate in meaning. It is not a judgement of the paper's quality or importance.

Always check findings against the original source before you rely on them, cite them or act on them.

Your content

“Your content” means what you put into the service: interview answers, projects, notes, saved papers, the questions you ask, and similar material.

• You keep ownership of your content.
• You give us permission to store and process your content only to run the service for you. That includes sending it to the service providers listed in our Privacy Policy, for example so a language model can match papers to your aim.
• We do not sell your content, and we do not use it to train machine learning models.
• You are responsible for your content, and for having the right to submit it.
• If you send us feedback or suggestions, we may use them without any obligation to you.

Agent access

• Agent keys are credentials. Keep them secret, and revoke any key you think has been exposed.
• Agent access is read-only and limited to the scope of your key. Each tool call counts toward your account's daily limit and, on the Free plan, its monthly allowance, as set out on the pricing page.
• Your agent and its model provider are third parties. Their own terms and privacy policies govern what they do with the information your agent retrieves, and you are responsible for how you use your agent and its output.
• The licensing rules above apply to anything your agent retrieves.
• We may rate-limit, suspend or revoke keys to protect the service or other users.

Third-party services

The service links to publishers' and preprint servers' websites, lets you sign in with Google and, where offered, lets you connect GitHub to sync notes to Obsidian. Those services are run by others under their own terms, and we are not responsible for their content or availability.

Changes, suspension and ending

• We may add, change or remove features. If we remove a significant paid feature, we will try to tell you in advance.
• You may stop using the service at any time and ask us to delete your account by emailing theonlytoufic@gmail.com.
• We may suspend or close your account if you seriously or repeatedly break these terms, if the law requires it, or to protect the service or other people. Where it is reasonable to do so, we will tell you first and explain why.
• Sections that by their nature should continue after your account ends will continue, including those on licences, disclaimers, liability and governing law.

Disclaimers

The service is provided “as is” and “as available”. To the fullest extent the law allows, we make no warranties of any kind, express or implied, including warranties of merchantability, fitness for a particular purpose, accuracy and non-infringement. We do not promise that the service will be uninterrupted or error-free, that it will find every relevant paper, or that its scores, analyses, findings or matches will be accurate or complete.

Limitation of liability

To the fullest extent the law allows, we will not be liable for any indirect, incidental, special, consequential or punitive damages, or for any loss of profits, revenue, data, research time or goodwill, arising from or related to the service. Our total liability for all claims relating to the service is limited to the greater of the amount you paid us in the 12 months before the claim and US$100.

Nothing in these terms limits or excludes liability that cannot be limited or excluded by law, such as liability for fraud, or for death or personal injury caused by negligence.

If your use of the service in breach of these terms or the law leads to a claim against us by someone else, you agree to cover our reasonable losses and costs from that claim, to the extent the law allows.

Governing law and disputes

These terms are governed by the laws of the United States and of the state in which Research Monitor's operator is established, without regard to conflict-of-law rules. Disputes will be heard by the courts of that state, unless the law where you live gives you the right to bring a claim there.

Before starting any formal dispute, please email theonlytoufic@gmail.com so we can try to resolve the issue informally. Nothing in this section takes away rights you have under mandatory consumer-protection law where you live.

General

• These terms and the Privacy Policy are the whole agreement between you and us about the service.
• If any part of these terms is found unenforceable, the rest stays in effect.
• If we do not enforce a term straight away, we have not waived our right to do so later.
• You may not transfer your rights under these terms without our consent. We may transfer ours as part of a reorganisation, merger or sale of the service, and will tell you if we do.

Changes to these terms

We may update these terms from time to time. We will change the date at the top of this page, and for material changes we will tell you by email or in the app at least 30 days before they take effect. If you keep using the service after the changes take effect, you accept the updated terms. If you don't accept them, you can cancel and stop using the service.

Contact

Questions about these terms: theonlytoufic@gmail.com.