Terms of Service
Welcome to Aard Research. These Terms of Service outline the rules, scientific disclaimers, intellectual property rights, and user conduct guidelines governing your use of our platform.
1. Acceptance of Terms & Platform Scope
By accessing, registering for, or using the Aard Research web platform, Progressive Web Application (PWA), or API services, you agree to be bound by these Terms of Service.
Aard Research provides an integrated environment for high school, undergraduate, and post-graduate scholars to conduct biomedical research, maintain digital lab notebooks, access computational tools, and collaborate with clinical mentors. If you do not agree to these terms, you should not use the platform.
2. Scientific & Medical Advice Disclaimer
- Aard Research does not provide medical diagnoses, treatment recommendations, or clinical medical advice.
- No content on this site creates a doctor-patient relationship or substitutes for professional medical evaluation by a licensed healthcare provider.
- Computational tool outputs and genomic calculations must be verified by qualified principal investigators prior to any real-world application.
3. Intellectual Property & Author Rights
Aard Research respects and protects student and researcher intellectual property rights:
- Research Ownership: Authors retain full copyright ownership of their original manuscript drafts, lab notebook entries, and proprietary dataset analyses submitted to the platform.
- Open-Access Publishing License: By publishing a paper or notebook on Aard Research, you grant Aard a non-exclusive, worldwide, royalty-free license to host, display, index, and distribute your work under Creative Commons (CC BY 4.0) open-access principles.
- Platform Branding: The Aard Research name, logo, UI assets, and medical theme designs are protected trademarks and proprietary assets of Aard Research.
4. Code of Scientific Ethics & Conduct
All users must uphold the highest standards of scientific integrity and academic honesty:
- Plagiarism & Fabrication: Plagiarism, data fabrication, image manipulation, or fraudulent research logs are strictly prohibited and result in immediate account termination.
- Respectful Peer Review: Collaboration, comments, and peer review feedback must remain constructive, evidence-based, and respectful.
- Security & Abuse: You agree not to reverse engineer computational tools, bypass access limits, or introduce malicious scripts onto the platform.
5. Limitation of Liability
To the maximum extent permitted by applicable law:
- Aard Research and its team shall not be liable for any indirect, incidental, special, or consequential damages resulting from platform downtime, data loss, or reliance on research published by third-party contributors.
- The platform and all included tools are provided on an "AS IS" and "AS AVAILABLE" basis without warranties of any kind.
6. Governance & Inquiries
We reserve the right to update these terms to reflect legal, regulatory, or technical changes. Continued use of Aard Research after updates constitutes acceptance of revised terms.
Aard Research Legal & Compliance
Direct Email: support@aardres.org · aardresearch@gmail.com