Terms of Service

Introduction

RefScout ("the Service") is operated by Insectivora Oy (Business ID 3482079-5, Tampere, Finland) ("we", "our"). By creating an account or using RefScout, you agree to these Terms of Service. If you do not agree, please do not use the Service.

RefScout is an academic source-discovery tool. It helps researchers find and cite real academic papers and check their references. We do not guarantee the accuracy, completeness, or fitness for any particular purpose of the information it provides.

What the Service does

During the pilot, RefScout offers these tools:

• Scout — search for real academic sources.
• Cite — detect citation-worthy claims in text you paste and suggest real sources for them.
• BibCheck — check a BibTeX bibliography for problems.
• PreSubmit — check a manuscript against venue-readiness criteria.
• A personal Library to save and export papers.

Other tools may appear as they are developed. Features can be added, changed, or removed during the pilot.

Accounts

You sign in with Google, GitHub, or ORCID (email/password registration is currently disabled). You must provide accurate information and keep your sign-in secure.

One account per person. Creating multiple accounts to get around fair-use limits is not allowed and may lead to suspension.

No account sharing. Your credentials are personal; you are responsible for activity under your account.

Acceptable use

You agree not to:

• Use the Service for any unlawful purpose or to infringe others' rights;
• Abuse or attempt to circumvent fair-use rate limits, or overload the Service or the third-party APIs it relies on (e.g. Anthropic, Semantic Scholar, OpenAlex, CrossRef, DBLP, Europe PMC, Unpaywall, arXiv, DOAJ, HAL, IETF, CORE, bioRxiv/medRxiv);
• Use bots, scrapers, or other automated access without our written permission;
• Attempt to gain unauthorized access to, reverse-engineer, or disrupt the Service or its infrastructure.

We may suspend or terminate access for violations, at our discretion.

Your content and ownership

You retain all rights to the text and files you submit and to the papers you save. We process your content only to provide the Service (see the Privacy Policy), and we do not use it to train AI models. We claim no ownership over your content.

A note on drafts and “not stored”. Drafts you paste are also saved in your own browser’s local storage — on your device — so your work isn’t lost between visits, with no automatic expiry (clear anytime by emptying the field or via your browser’s “clear site data” control). This is separate from running a tool: submitting text to Cite/BibCheck/PreSubmit sends it to our servers, but only to perform that request — it is not stored afterward.

No guarantee of correctness

RefScout is an academic source-discovery and recommendation tool: it suggests references, citations, and related material to assist your research workflow. It does not author, endorse, peer-review, or certify any source it returns, and surfacing a source is not a representation that the source exists as described, is accurate, is relevant to your work, or is appropriate to cite. All outputs are suggestions for your independent evaluation, not statements of fact.

RefScout makes no warranty that any suggested source is genuine, correctly attributed, currently available, un-retracted, or that its metadata (title, authors, year, DOI, venue, abstract) is correct. Automated and AI-assisted features can produce incomplete, outdated, or fabricated ("hallucinated") results. In particular, a suggested source may be a real paper that does not actually support your specific claim, and a "valid DOI" indicator only means the source resolves — not that it supports your point.

RefScout's checks and suggestions — including citation verification, bibliography linting, glossary, and pre-submission checks — are writing aids, not guarantees, and may produce false positives or miss genuine issues. RefScout does not guarantee academic correctness or that a manuscript will be accepted by any venue. You must exercise your own academic judgment and comply with the requirements of your venue, institution, and field. You remain responsible for independently verifying every source, citation, check, and suggestion — confirming that it exists, that its details are accurate, and that it genuinely supports the claim you cite it for — before relying on it or citing it in your work.

Pricing

RefScout is currently free during the pilot phase. Pricing will be announced before any charges begin, and no payment method is required to use the Service today.

Termination and account deletion

You may stop using RefScout at any time. To delete your account and associated data, email [email protected] from your account email; deletion requests are handled manually and completed within 30 days. We may suspend or terminate accounts that violate these Terms.

Disclaimers and limitation of liability

No warranties. The Service is provided "as is" and "as available", without warranties of any kind, express or implied, including accuracy, completeness, merchantability, fitness for a particular purpose, and non-infringement.

Limitation of liability. To the fullest extent permitted by applicable law, Insectivora Oy shall not be liable for any direct, indirect, incidental, consequential, or special damages, or for any academic, reputational, financial, or professional consequences, arising from your use of — or inability to use — the Service, or from your reliance on any source, suggestion, verification result, or other output, including any unverified, inaccurate, or fabricated suggestion that you did not independently confirm. Your sole remedy for dissatisfaction with the Service is to stop using it. Nothing in these Terms limits liability that cannot be limited under applicable law.

(Note: this limitation-of-liability language is standard boilerplate and should be reviewed by a qualified lawyer before any public, non-pilot launch.)

Governing law

These Terms are governed by the laws of Finland, and any disputes are subject to the jurisdiction of the Finnish courts, without prejudice to any mandatory consumer-protection rights you may have where you live.

Contact

• Contact: [email protected]

We may update these Terms as the Service changes. Continued use after changes are posted constitutes acceptance of the revised Terms.