Curator agreement

Rights you grant us

You keep the copyright in what you write. You grant us a worldwide, royalty-free, irrevocable and sublicensable right to store, publish, translate, adapt and redistribute your contributions as part of this corpus, including under an open licence (CC BY 4.0). This is what makes the record citable and reusable by anyone — without it we could not publish your assessment at all. The grant covers the contribution you make here and nothing else; it creates no claim on your other work.

What you confirm you may contribute

You confirm that your contributions are your own, that you are free to share them, and that they contain no third-party material you have no right to publish, no confidential or unpublished data belonging to others, and no personal data of third parties. Quotations from a paper must stay short and be clearly marked as quotations.

How you are named

By default your assessments are published WITHOUT your name — they appear as "Community scientist". Being named is your choice: switch it on in your account settings, and switch it off again whenever you like. The switch applies to all of your assessments, past and future. While it is on, your name, your affiliation and a link to your ORCID record appear next to them; your email address never does. Being named is attribution of the assessment — it is not authorship of the paper or of this platform (see "No co-authorship" above). We may publish aggregate contribution statistics that do not name you.

Conflict of interest — automatic recusal

You may never assess your own papers, papers by anyone you have ever co-authored with, or papers from your own institution. The system detects these from public authorship data (ORCID / OpenAlex) and blocks them for your account automatically. You also undertake not to circumvent this.

No co-authorship

Curating a record creates no authorship or co-authorship of any paper, dataset, or of this platform. You contribute an attributed reproducibility assessment and nothing more; it does not change the authorship of the work you assess.

No compensation

This is unpaid, voluntary scientific service. No payment, honorarium, fee, or compensation of any kind is owed or implied, now or in the future.

No other benefit or claim

Contributing creates no employment, agency, partnership, membership, or other relationship, and confers no claim, entitlement, or intellectual-property interest. There is no benefit beyond the contribution to science itself.

For the greater good of science

The sole purpose is to strengthen the reproducibility of the published record, for the greater good of science. Assessments are not peer review, not an audit, and not a determination of error or misconduct by any author.

Scientific standards

Assess honestly, within your competence, on the evidence. Level 3 and Level 4 require documented methods and results so that any reader can check your work. A failure to reproduce is a finding, not an accusation.

Your personal data

We process your name, email address, ORCID, affiliation and the publication you gave to identify yourself, in order to check that you are a researcher, to attribute your contributions internally, and to reach you about your account. Your name, ORCID and affiliation appear next to your published assessments ONLY while you have attribution switched on; your email address is never published. Who submitted an assessment is always recorded internally — that is what makes conflict-of-interest checks and re-opening possible — but it is shown publicly only with your consent. Legal basis, retention and your rights are set out in the privacy notice.

If you stop

You can stop at any time. Assessments you already published stay published — a scientific record that silently changes is worth nothing — but you can take your name off them at any moment by switching attribution off. The rights granted above continue for contributions already published.

Deleting your account

You can delete your account yourself, in your account settings, without asking anyone. When you do, we irreversibly erase your personal data — name, email address, ORCID, affiliation, identifying publication, password and sign-in history — and we sever every link between you and what you submitted. Your published assessments remain, permanently de-personalised: they can no longer be traced back to you, by us or by anyone else, and they never carry your name again. We keep them because others rely on them and because a record that vanishes is not a record; about you we keep nothing.

Good faith & corrections

Assessments are made in good faith and may be wrong; every record carries a way to report an error and is correctable. By contributing you confirm your statements are your own honest scientific judgement.

Curator agreement version 2026-07-29.