Terms of service

These terms govern use of the Trace website and application, operated by Trace Labs, Inc. — a placeholder entity name to be replaced on incorporation. Using the service means accepting these terms. If you are accepting on behalf of an organisation, you confirm you are authorised to do so.

The service is in private beta. Features may change or be withdrawn, and availability is not guaranteed. Enterprise engagements are governed by a separate written agreement, which prevails over these terms where the two conflict.

You are responsible for the security of your credentials and for activity in your workspace. Credentials must not be shared; where a collaborator or agency needs access, they are given their own scoped role so that the audit log remains meaningful.

Access may be suspended where an account is being used in breach of these terms, where it threatens the security or integrity of the service, or where required by law. We intend to give notice and an opportunity to correct the problem wherever that is possible.

You retain all rights in the content you submit. Nothing here transfers ownership of a manuscript, a dataset, or a portfolio.

You grant a limited licence to store and process that content solely in order to provide the service to you. That licence does not extend to training models. Customer manuscript content is not used to train models without an explicit, revocable, workspace-level opt-in, and a change to these terms will never be used as the mechanism for granting that permission.

By uploading a document you confirm you have the rights to process it. Where reuse rights to a full text cannot be confirmed, analysis runs on metadata only and the resulting report says so on its face.

Measurements produced by the service, including the Trace Visibility Index, are product heuristics under active validation. They are not validated scientific metrics. They must not be presented as a measure of research quality, and they are not suitable for use in hiring, promotion, tenure, funding, or any other evaluation of an individual.

Synthetic stakeholder panel output is simulated. It is not survey data, not evidence of clinician or patient opinion, and not a substitute for human research. It is labelled as simulated in the interface and in every export, and those labels must not be removed from material derived from it.

Changes observed over time are reported as changes over time. The service does not establish causation, and its outputs must not be described as demonstrating that an intervention caused an observed shift.

Nothing produced by the service is medical, legal, regulatory, or financial advice, and it does not replace medical, legal, and regulatory review of material intended for external use.

You may not use the service to:

• Create, coordinate, or automate undisclosed advocacy, synthetic endorsements, fabricated testimonials, or accounts that present themselves as independent parties.
• Present simulated output as human data, survey results, or evidence of professional opinion.
• Publish an unvalidated visibility measurement as a public quality score for an article, a journal, an institution, or a person.
• Misrepresent research findings, strip stated limitations, or generate material that overstates what a study supports.
• Upload content you do not have the rights to process, or protected health information and other regulated personal data.
• Evade rate limits, scrape the service, or attempt to access another workspace’s data.

These restrictions match capabilities the product deliberately does not have. Simulation runs in a sandbox with no network path to any live platform, and there is no facility to post, message, or act as a person anywhere.

The service draws on public scholarly infrastructure and on third-party providers, each governed by its own terms. Where a source requires attribution, that attribution travels with the data. Where a source restricts commercial use or redistribution, the product enforces the restriction rather than relying on the customer to remember it.

Third-party data is provided as it is received. Bibliographic records contain errors, and where sources disagree the service preserves and displays the disagreement rather than choosing silently.

The service is provided without an uptime commitment during private beta. Planned maintenance and incident history are described on the status page, which is currently illustrative and not connected to live monitoring.

Features may change. Where a change would alter how a measurement is produced, the methodology version changes with it, so a figure produced under an earlier version remains interpretable.

The service is provided on an “as is” basis, without warranties of any kind to the extent permitted by law. No warranty is given that measurements are accurate, complete, or fit for a particular purpose, and the limitations in section 4 are part of what you are agreeing to.

To the extent permitted by law, liability for indirect, incidental, or consequential loss is excluded, and total liability is limited to the amounts paid for the service in the twelve months preceding the claim. The precise formulation of this section is among the parts most likely to change under legal review.

You may close your account at any time and export your content before doing so. On termination, workspace content is deleted in accordance with the privacy policy, with audit and billing records retained as described there.

Governing law and dispute resolution are not settled and will be specified in the reviewed version. Questions about these terms: hello@trace.science.