Terms of Service

Essence Scholar is a research assistant: you bring academic papers — your own or ones you are reading — and AI agents analyze them and tailor the output to your research profile. By creating an account you agree to these terms and to our Privacy Policy.

You need an account to use the service. Keep your password and API keys to yourself — anything done with your credentials counts as done by you. Tell us promptly if you think someone else has access.

One account is for one person. Institutional email domains we recognise receive a larger starting credit grant; that is a courtesy, not an entitlement, and we may change it.

You keep all rights to the documents you upload and the notes you write. You give us permission to process them solely to provide the service to you — parsing, indexing, and sending relevant excerpts to the AI models that generate your analyses.

We do not sell your documents, and we do not publish them. Nothing you upload becomes public unless you explicitly opt in to a public surface, such as publishing a researcher profile.

Only upload material you have the right to upload. Sharing a paywalled paper with the service is between you and whoever licensed it to you.

Analyses, summaries, referee-style reports, and profile drafts are produced by language models. They can be wrong, incomplete, or confidently mistaken, and they are not a substitute for reading the paper or for your own academic judgement.

Faster ingestion modes read only a PDF's text layer and see less structure in tables and figures, which makes mistakes more likely. Check anything you intend to rely on, cite, or submit.

Do not present AI-generated text as your own scholarly work where that would breach your institution's rules or a publisher's policy. That judgement is yours to make.

Actions that cost real compute consume credits, and the cost is shown before you spend them. Credits have no cash value and are not refundable except where the law requires it. If an operation fails through our fault, tell us and we will restore the credits.

You agree not to:

• break the service, probe it for vulnerabilities without permission, or work around its limits;
• use it to produce material that is unlawful, harassing, or deliberately deceptive;
• upload personal data about other people beyond what a normal academic paper contains;
• resell the service or scrape it to build a competing dataset.

The service is provided as-is. We run it carefully but do not promise uninterrupted availability, and features may change or be withdrawn. We will not delete your data without warning as part of an ordinary change.

You can delete your account at any time from Settings → Account. Deletion is immediate and irreversible: your papers, settings, profile, notebooks, routines, analyses, API keys, and product events are erased. Export anything you want to keep first.

We may suspend an account that breaches these terms, and will say why where we can.

To the extent the law allows, we are not liable for indirect or consequential loss, or for decisions you make on the basis of AI output. Nothing here limits liability that cannot lawfully be limited — including your statutory rights as a consumer in the EU.

If we change these terms materially we will raise the version number and ask you to accept the new version in the app. Continuing to use the service after that means you accept it.

These terms are governed by the law of the Netherlands. Questions, complaints, or data requests: admin@essencescholar.com.