Terms of Use

1. Service Description

JournalReady reviews manuscript drafts against configured journal, article-type, reporting, and submission-readiness expectations. The service focuses on decision-support signals, including structure, methods clarity, declarations, figures, tables, references, consistency, target fit, and related editorial risks.

Any fee charged through JournalReady is for time-limited access to the hosted manuscript-review service. Any review document, annotated manuscript file, or similar generated file made available through the service is an incidental output of that service and is not sold as a separate standalone item.

2. Editorial Scope and Limitations

JournalReady is editorial in scope. It does not provide peer review, legal advice, regulatory advice, medical advice, or a guarantee of scientific correctness. An output from JournalReady does not guarantee journal acceptance, peer-review outcome, scientific validity, or compliance with all publisher, ethical, or institutional requirements.

3. User Responsibilities

You remain responsible for your manuscript and submission decisions, including:

• Scientific accuracy, data integrity, authorship, and originality.
• Patient confidentiality, permissions, ethics approvals, and informed consent where applicable.
• Final compliance with target-journal instructions, publisher systems, and editorial correspondence.
• Any revisions, interpretation, or reliance placed on JournalReady outputs.

4. Manuscripts and User Content

You may upload only content that you have the right to submit for processing. You must not upload material in violation of confidentiality obligations, intellectual-property rights, privacy rights, or applicable law. You grant JournalReady a limited right to process uploaded content solely to provide the requested pre-submission review service and related service operations.

5. Confidentiality and Retention

JournalReady is designed for transient manuscript handling, does not maintain a long-term manuscript archive, and does not use uploaded manuscripts to train models. Temporary generated outputs may be available for a limited access window and may expire automatically. You remain responsible for preserving your own authoritative manuscript records and submission files.

6. Guest Access and Purchases

JournalReady may offer guest access and paid manuscript-review service entitlements tied to a user email address or temporary purchase token. Purchased access is a limited digital service access right and may be time-limited. Unused access, expired access, pricing, and any refund treatment are subject to the policies displayed at checkout, these Terms, and applicable law.

7. Refunds

Except where required by applicable law, refunds are limited to material technical failures of the purchased review service, such as a failure to generate the service outputs because the service could not successfully process the uploaded manuscript file. Examples may include unrecoverable parsing failure, OCR failure, or system failure that prevents delivery of the purchased review service.

Refunds are not available solely because a user disagrees with the review findings, receives critical findings, chooses not to use the outputs, or does not obtain journal acceptance.

8. Payment Processing

If paid access is enabled, payments are processed through third-party payment providers such as Stripe. JournalReady does not store full payment card details. Your payment relationship may also be subject to the payment provider’s own terms and privacy practices.

9. Acceptable Use

You agree not to:

• Use the service for unlawful, fraudulent, abusive, or deceptive purposes.
• Upload malware, malicious files, or content intended to disrupt infrastructure or third-party systems.
• Attempt unauthorized access, reverse engineering, scraping, or interference with JournalReady systems.
• Misrepresent JournalReady outputs as scientific validation, publisher endorsement, or peer-review certification.

10. Intellectual Property

JournalReady, including its software, workflows, interface design, generated outputs, branding, and underlying service materials, remains protected by applicable intellectual-property laws. Except for the limited right to use the service in accordance with these Terms, no license or ownership right is transferred to you.

11. Availability and Changes

We may update, improve, suspend, restrict, or discontinue parts of the service at any time. JournalReady may evolve as we refine journal coverage, deployment infrastructure, payment handling, legal operations, and product features.

12. Disclaimer of Warranties

To the maximum extent permitted by law, JournalReady is provided on an “as is” and “as available” basis, without warranties of any kind, whether express or implied, including warranties of accuracy, merchantability, fitness for a particular purpose, non-infringement, or uninterrupted availability.

13. Limitation of Liability

To the maximum extent permitted by law, JournalReady and Trieste AI LLC will not be liable for indirect, incidental, consequential, special, exemplary, or punitive damages, or for loss of data, manuscript opportunity, submission outcome, revenue, goodwill, or professional opportunity arising from or related to use of the service.

Where liability cannot be excluded, it will be limited to the amount you paid for the specific review giving rise to the claim during the twelve months preceding the event, to the extent permitted by law.

14. Indemnity

You agree to indemnify and hold harmless JournalReady and Trieste AI LLC from claims, losses, liabilities, and expenses arising out of your content, your misuse of the service, or your breach of these Terms, to the extent permitted by law.

15. Governing Law

These Terms are governed by the laws of the State of California, without regard to conflict-of-law principles, except to the extent otherwise required by applicable law.

16. Changes to These Terms

We may revise these Terms from time to time. The version posted on this page will apply as of its effective date. Your continued use of the service after updated Terms become effective constitutes acceptance of those updated Terms.

17. Contact

Questions regarding these Terms may be sent to support@journalready.org.