Terms of Use

1. The Service

1.1 AuditOwl performs an automated, AI-based analysis of a scientific manuscript and an associated code repository that you provide ("Materials") and produces a report of potential issues ("Results").

1.2 The Service is currently offered as a free beta. It is experimental, may change at any time, and may contain errors. You have no claim to the Service being available, to any particular feature, or to any particular processing time. Stated processing times (such as "up to 24 hours") are non-binding estimates.

1.3 We may limit use of the Service, in particular the number of audits per user and period, and may decline, cancel or delete any audit without giving reasons.

2. Nature of the Results; no warranty

2.1 Results are generated automatically by artificial intelligence. They may be incomplete, inaccurate, outdated or wrong. They may report issues that do not exist (false positives) and may miss issues that do exist (false negatives). The absence of a reported issue does not mean that the Materials are free of errors.

2.2 Results are provided for informational purposes only. They are not peer review, not an expert opinion, not a certification or attestation of correctness, reproducibility or scientific integrity, and not legal, scientific, editorial or other professional advice.

2.3 You are solely responsible for independently checking any Result before relying on it, and for every decision you make on the basis of, or with the help of, the Service, including decisions about submission, publication, acceptance, rejection, retraction, funding, employment or allegations of misconduct.

2.4 You must not use Results as the sole basis for any decision that is adverse to another person, and you must not publish or communicate Results as established fact about a person, their work or their conduct.

2.5 To the extent permitted by law, the Service and the Results are provided "as is" and "as available", without any warranty or guarantee of any kind, express or implied, including as to accuracy, completeness, fitness for a particular purpose or non-infringement.

3. Your obligations

3.1 During the beta, you may only upload Materials that are already publicly available, for example a paper published on arXiv and its code on GitHub. You must not upload unpublished or confidential Materials; if you do so nonetheless, you act in breach of these Terms and at your own risk. In any case, you may only upload Materials that you are entitled to upload and to have analysed.

3.2 You must not upload Materials that are unlawful, infringe the rights of third parties, contain malware, or contain personal data beyond what is necessary. You are responsible for any personal data contained in the Materials.

3.3 You must not misuse the Service, in particular by circumventing usage limits, creating multiple accounts to obtain additional free audits, interfering with its operation or security, or attempting to extract the underlying models, prompts or source code.

3.4 You are responsible for keeping your account credentials confidential and for all activity under your account.

4. Rights to Materials and Results

4.1 You retain all rights to your Materials. You grant us a non-exclusive, worldwide, royalty-free right, limited to the duration of processing and storage, to store, copy, process and analyse the Materials, and to transmit them to our service providers (in particular hosting providers and AI model providers, including Anthropic PBC, USA), solely to provide the Service to you. Details are set out in the Privacy Policy.

4.2 We do not use your Materials to train AI models, and we do not permit our AI model providers to use them for that purpose to the extent their settings allow us to exclude it.

4.3 Subject to these Terms, you may use the Results for your own purposes.

5. Confidentiality and security

We take reasonable technical and organisational measures to protect Materials against unauthorised access. However, no system is completely secure, and we cannot guarantee that unauthorised access, loss or disclosure will never occur. Our liability for such events is governed by Section 6. You can delete your Materials and audits in your account at any time.

6. Limitation of liability

6.1 The Service is provided free of charge. We are therefore liable only for damage caused intentionally or by gross negligence by us, our legal representatives or our vicarious agents.

6.2 The limitation in Section 6.1 does not apply to (a) damage resulting from injury to life, body or health, (b) liability under the German Product Liability Act (Produkthaftungsgesetz), (c) defects we have fraudulently concealed, and (d) any guarantee we have expressly given.

6.3 In particular, and subject to Sections 6.1 and 6.2, we are not liable for any loss or damage arising from the content of Results, from reliance on Results, from decisions taken on the basis of Results, from the Service being unavailable, delayed or interrupted, or from the loss of Materials or Results. You are responsible for keeping your own copies of your Materials.

6.4 The above limitations also apply in favour of our employees, representatives, contributors and vicarious agents.

7. Indemnity

You shall indemnify us against all claims asserted by third parties against us because of Materials you uploaded or because of your use of the Service or the Results in breach of these Terms or of the law, including the reasonable costs of legal defence, unless you are not responsible for the breach.

8. Availability, changes and termination

8.1 We may change, suspend or discontinue the Service, or any part of it, at any time, including ending the beta.

8.2 You may stop using the Service and delete your account at any time. We may suspend or delete accounts that breach these Terms.

8.3 We may amend these Terms. The version in force when you start an audit applies to that audit. Before starting a new audit after an amendment, you will be asked to accept the new version.

9. Final provisions

9.1 These Terms are governed by the laws of the Federal Republic of Germany, excluding the UN Convention on Contracts for the International Sale of Goods. If you are a consumer, this choice of law does not deprive you of the protection of mandatory provisions of the law of the country in which you have your habitual residence.

9.2 If you are a merchant, a legal entity under public law or a special fund under public law, the exclusive place of jurisdiction for all disputes arising from or in connection with these Terms is the Provider's place of business.

9.3 Should any provision of these Terms be or become invalid, the validity of the remaining provisions shall not be affected. The statutory provisions apply in place of the invalid provision.

9.4 We are neither obliged nor willing to participate in dispute resolution proceedings before a consumer arbitration board.