Terms of Service

Document ID: LEG-02 · Version: 1.0 · Effective Date: 8 August 2026

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1. Agreement to these Terms

1.1 These Terms of Service ("Terms") are a binding agreement between you and AutoConference.ai ("AutoConference", "we", "us"). They govern your access to and use of https://autoconference.ai, its APIs, and all related services (the "Service"). By creating an account, submitting content, performing a review, or otherwise using the Service, you accept these Terms.

1.2 The following documents are incorporated by reference and form part of these Terms: the Privacy Policy (LEG-03), the Consent to Research Use of Platform Data (LEG-01), the Author Submission and Licence Agreement (LEG-04), the Reviewer Agreement (LEG-05), and the Code of Conduct at https://autoconference.ai/legal/terms-of-service.

1.3 If you do not agree, do not use the Service.

1.4 If you use the Service on behalf of an institution, venue, or employer, you represent that you have authority to bind that entity, and "you" includes that entity.

2. Definitions

2.1 "Contribution" means anything you submit, upload, post, or generate through the Service, including manuscripts, abstracts, figures, code, data, reviews, meta-reviews, rebuttals, comments, and profile information.

2.2 "Submission" means a manuscript and its associated materials submitted for review.

2.3 "Venue" means a conference, workshop, journal, or other organiser using the Service to run a review process.

2.4 "Automated Review" means review text, scores, or recommendations generated wholly or substantially by an artificial intelligence system operated by or for us.

2.4a "Open Research Venue" means a Venue whose declared purpose includes publishing its complete review record as an open, attributable research corpus and using that record to train and evaluate automated review models. Participation is on the terms in LEG-01 §§5.4–5.8, which are shown to you on a dedicated screen before your first submission or review assignment at such a Venue. "Standard Venue" means any other Venue.

2.5 "Human Reviewer" means a natural person performing review functions through the Service.

3. Eligibility and accounts

3.1 You must be at least 16 years old, or the age of digital consent in your jurisdiction if higher.

3.2 One person, one account. You must register with your real name and a verifiable institutional or professional identity, and keep your profile accurate. Creating multiple accounts, registering under a false identity, or using another person's account is a material breach.

3.3 We may verify your identity, affiliation, and publication record against public sources and identity providers such as ORCID, and may suspend accounts we cannot verify.

3.4 You are responsible for the security of your credentials and for all activity under your account. Notify us at security@autoconference.ai promptly on any suspected compromise.

3.5 We may create placeholder profiles from publicly available bibliographic sources so that authorship and reviewer expertise can be represented before a person registers. You may claim, correct, or request deletion of such a profile at any time.

4. The nature of the Service — please read this section

4.1 AutoConference provides automated and semi-automated peer review. Reviews may be generated by artificial intelligence systems, by human reviewers, or by a combination, according to each Venue's configuration.

4.2 Automated Reviews are labelled. Wherever an Automated Review is displayed, it is identified as machine-generated and carries provenance metadata indicating the model family and pipeline version. Do not represent an Automated Review as a human expert opinion.

4.3 Automated Reviews have real limitations. They may contain factual errors, may fabricate citations, may misread a method, may miss the contribution of a paper entirely, and may express all of these confidently. They may reflect biases present in training data. They are not a substitute for expert human judgement and we do not present them as one.

4.4 We are infrastructure, not the editorial authority. Except where we ourselves act as the Venue, editorial decisions belong to the Venue. We do not guarantee that any Submission will be reviewed, accepted, or published, and we make no representation about the standing, indexing, or academic recognition of any Venue using the Service.

4.5 Nothing produced by the Service is professional, legal, medical, or financial advice.

4.6 Automated decision-making safeguards, including your right to human review and to appeal, are set out in LEG-01 Part C and are incorporated here.

5. Your Contributions and the licence you grant

5.1 You keep your copyright. We claim no ownership in your Contributions.

5.2 Licence to us. You grant AutoConference.ai a worldwide, non-exclusive, royalty-free, sublicensable, perpetual and irrevocable licence to host, store, reproduce, transmit, display, index, format, translate, excerpt, and create derivative works of your Contributions, and to distribute them at the visibility level set by the Venue, in each case solely for: operating and improving the Service; performing review; maintaining the scholarly record; and the research purposes described in LEG-01. "Derivative works" here includes machine-readable transformations such as embeddings, summaries, and structured extractions that are technically necessary to run the Service.

5.3 "Perpetual and irrevocable" is limited: it exists so that the scholarly record stays intact and citations do not break. It does not override your data protection rights, and it does not permit us to use your Contributions for purposes outside those listed in §5.2. In particular, "improving the Service" does not by itself authorise us to train, fine-tune, or benchmark machine learning models on your Contributions: we may do so only where you have separately opted in under LEG-01 A.2, or where you have participated in an Open Research Venue on the terms of LEG-01 §§5.4–5.8.

5.4 Reviews, meta-reviews, and public comments are released under Creative Commons Attribution 4.0 (CC BY 4.0) at the point the Venue publishes them, unless the Venue specifies otherwise before the review is written. Attribution runs to the author or, where reviewing is anonymous, to the pseudonymous reviewer identifier and the Venue. Reviews that the Venue does not publish are not licensed under this section and remain confidential under §6.

5.5 Bibliographic metadata of published submissions — titles, author lists, abstracts, keywords, dates, decision status, DOIs — is released under CC0 1.0 so that indexers and bibliographic services can use it freely. This applies only once the Venue has published the Submission; the metadata of confidential or withdrawn Submissions is not licensed under this section. Because the abstract is always CC0 on publication, this overrides any narrower public licence you select for the Submission body under LEG-04 §4.1 — that choice governs the full text, not the metadata.

5.6 Submission licensing is governed by LEG-04, including your choice of open licence where the Venue offers one.

5.7 Your warranties. You represent that your Contributions are your original work or that you have all necessary rights; that they do not infringe copyright, patent, trademark, trade secret, privacy, or publicity rights; that any third-party material is properly licensed and attributed; that you have each co-author's authorisation to submit and to grant these licences; and that you have any required institutional, ethics-board, or funder approvals.

6. Confidentiality

6.1 Unpublished Submissions and non-public review materials are confidential. If you receive access to them — as a reviewer, area chair, programme chair, or otherwise — you must not disclose, distribute, cite, or use them for any purpose other than performing your role.

6.2 You must not upload confidential Submissions or review materials to any external system that does not offer contractual confidentiality and no-training guarantees. Pasting an unpublished manuscript into a consumer chatbot is a breach of this section. See LEG-05 §3 for the detailed rule.

6.3 These obligations survive termination of your account and continue until the material is lawfully made public.

7. Prohibited conduct

7.1 You must not:

• (a) submit work that is plagiarised, fabricated, falsified, or previously published in violation of the Venue's policy;
• (b) submit substantially the same work to multiple Venues simultaneously where the Venue prohibits it;
• (c) embed hidden instructions, prompt injections, invisible text, adversarial perturbations, steganographic content, or any other mechanism intended to influence an Automated Review — this is treated as research misconduct, not as a clever trick;
• (d) attempt to identify anonymous reviewers or authors, or to circumvent anonymisation;
• (e) collude on reviews, trade positive reviews, bid on submissions to steer outcomes, or organise review rings;
• (f) submit reviews that are wholly generated by an external AI system in violation of LEG-05, or submit reviews you have not read and do not stand behind;
• (g) scrape the Service other than through documented APIs and within published rate limits, or bypass access controls;
• (h) upload malware, attempt to gain unauthorised access, probe or test our security without written authorisation, or disrupt the Service;
• (i) harass, threaten, defame, or discriminate against any user, or post content that is unlawful;
• (j) use the Service to generate reviews for work being evaluated elsewhere, in a way that violates that other process's rules; or
• (k) misrepresent the output of the Service as human expert review.

7.2 Security research. We welcome good-faith vulnerability research conducted under our disclosure policy at https://autoconference.ai/legal. Research within that policy is not a breach of §7.1(g)–(h) and we will not pursue claims over it.

8. Enforcement

8.1 Where we reasonably believe these Terms have been breached, we may: request an explanation; issue a warning; remove or restrict content; desk-reject a Submission; withdraw a review from consideration; suspend or terminate an account; and, in serious cases, notify the Venue, your institution, your co-authors, and relevant integrity bodies, and publish a notice of the outcome.

8.2 Proportionality and process. Before any sanction beyond content removal, we will tell you what we believe happened and give you a reasonable opportunity to respond, unless doing so would frustrate an investigation or create a safety or security risk. You may appeal any sanction at https://autoconference.ai/legal. Appeals are decided by a person not involved in the original decision.

8.3 Detection of AI-generated or manipulated content is imperfect. We will not sanction on the basis of a detector score alone.

9. Venues

9.1 Venues configure their own review workflows, visibility settings, deadlines, and acceptance criteria, and are responsible for those choices and for their communications with participants.

9.2 Where a Venue determines the purposes and means of processing participants' personal data, that Venue is a data controller and we act as its processor for that processing. Where we determine those purposes and means — including for the research uses in LEG-01 and for operating the Service generally — we are the controller. The Privacy Policy sets out the split in detail.

9.3 Venues must comply with these Terms and with the Venue Agreement at https://autoconference.ai/legal. We may suspend a Venue that does not.

10. Our intellectual property

10.1 The Service, its software, interfaces, models, prompts, evaluation rubrics, documentation, and the AutoConference name and logos are owned by us or our licensors. These Terms grant you a limited, revocable, non-transferable licence to use the Service for its intended purpose, and nothing more.

10.2 You may not reverse engineer the Service, extract model weights or prompts, or use outputs of the Service to train a competing model, except as permitted by applicable law or by a separate written agreement.

10.3 Feedback you give us about the Service may be used freely and without obligation to you.

11. Copyright complaints

11.1 We respond to notices under the Digital Millennium Copyright Act, 17 U.S.C. §512, and to equivalent notices under other applicable laws. Send notices to our designated agent at legal@autoconference.ai, including all elements required by §512(c)(3). Counter-notices follow §512(g). We terminate the accounts of repeat infringers.

11.2 Filing a knowingly false notice carries liability under §512(f).

12. Availability and changes to the Service

12.1 We provide the Service "as available". We may modify, suspend, or discontinue features, and we will give reasonable advance notice of changes that materially reduce functionality during an active review cycle.

12.2 If we shut down. If we discontinue the Service, we will give at least 90 days' notice, provide an export mechanism for your Contributions in an open format, and use reasonable efforts to transfer the public scholarly record to a preservation service such as CLOCKSS.

13. Termination

13.1 You may close your account at any time. Closure does not remove Contributions that are part of the public scholarly record, for the reasons given in §5.3 and LEG-01 §6.2.

13.2 We may suspend or terminate your access for breach of these Terms, for legal or security reasons, or if your account is inactive for more than 5 years after notice.

13.3 The following survive termination: §3.5 (your right to correct or delete a placeholder profile), §4.6 (automated decision-making safeguards), §5 (licences), §6 (confidentiality), §8.2 (your right to notice and appeal), §10, §11, §12.2 (export and preservation on shutdown), and §§14–18.

14. Disclaimers

14.1 TO THE MAXIMUM EXTENT PERMITTED BY LAW, THE SERVICE IS PROVIDED "AS IS" AND "AS AVAILABLE", WITHOUT WARRANTIES OF ANY KIND, EXPRESS OR IMPLIED, INCLUDING WITHOUT LIMITATION IMPLIED WARRANTIES OF MERCHANTABILITY, FITNESS FOR A PARTICULAR PURPOSE, TITLE, ACCURACY, AND NON-INFRINGEMENT.

14.2 WE DO NOT WARRANT THAT AUTOMATED REVIEWS ARE ACCURATE, COMPLETE, UNBIASED, OR SUITABLE FOR ANY PARTICULAR DECISION, OR THAT THE SERVICE WILL BE UNINTERRUPTED, SECURE, OR ERROR-FREE.

14.3 Some jurisdictions do not allow the exclusion of implied warranties. In those places, the exclusions above apply only to the extent permitted, and you may have rights that these Terms cannot limit. Nothing here excludes liability for death or personal injury caused by negligence, for fraud or fraudulent misrepresentation, or for anything else that cannot lawfully be excluded.

15. Limitation of liability

15.1 TO THE MAXIMUM EXTENT PERMITTED BY LAW, WE WILL NOT BE LIABLE FOR ANY INDIRECT, INCIDENTAL, SPECIAL, CONSEQUENTIAL, OR PUNITIVE DAMAGES, OR FOR LOSS OF PROFITS, REVENUE, DATA, GOODWILL, REPUTATION, ACADEMIC OPPORTUNITY, FUNDING, OR EMPLOYMENT, ARISING OUT OF OR RELATING TO THE SERVICE, WHETHER IN CONTRACT, TORT, OR OTHERWISE, AND WHETHER OR NOT WE HAVE BEEN ADVISED OF THE POSSIBILITY OF SUCH DAMAGES.

15.2 OUR TOTAL AGGREGATE LIABILITY ARISING OUT OF OR RELATING TO THE SERVICE WILL NOT EXCEED THE GREATER OF (A) THE AMOUNTS YOU PAID US IN THE TWELVE MONTHS BEFORE THE EVENT GIVING RISE TO THE CLAIM, AND (B) USD 100.

15.3 These limits are a basic part of the bargain between us and reflect the fact that much of the Service is provided at low or no cost. They apply even if a limited remedy fails of its essential purpose, and only to the extent permitted by law in your jurisdiction.

16. Indemnity

16.1 You will indemnify and hold harmless AutoConference.ai, its officers, employees, and agents from third-party claims arising out of your Contributions, your breach of these Terms, your violation of law, or your infringement of another party's rights, including reasonable legal fees. We will notify you of any such claim and you may control the defence, provided any settlement that admits fault or imposes obligations on us requires our written consent.

16.2 This section does not apply to consumers where applicable consumer protection law prohibits it.

17. Governing law and disputes

17.1 These Terms are governed by the laws of the State of Delaware, USA, without regard to conflict-of-law rules. The UN Convention on Contracts for the International Sale of Goods does not apply.

17.2 Informal resolution first. Before filing anything, contact legal@autoconference.ai with a description of the dispute. We will try in good faith to resolve it within 60 days.

17.3 Forum. Subject to §17.4, the state and federal courts located in New Castle County, Delaware have exclusive jurisdiction, and you consent to personal jurisdiction there.

17.4 Consumers and EEA/UK residents. If you are a consumer resident in the EEA, the UK, or Switzerland, nothing in §§17.1–17.3 deprives you of the protection of mandatory provisions of the law of your country of residence, and you may bring proceedings in your local courts. The EU Online Dispute Resolution platform is available at https://autoconference.ai/legal.

17.5 Limitation period. Any claim must be brought within one year after it arises, to the extent such a limit is enforceable in your jurisdiction.

🔶 Counsel decision point: whether to add a binding arbitration clause with a class-action waiver. It reduces litigation exposure in the US but is unenforceable against EEA/UK consumers, is increasingly disfavoured for mass-arbitration reasons, and reads badly to an academic user base. See 00-README §4.2.

18. General

18.1 Changes. We may update these Terms. Material changes take effect 30 days after we notify you by email and post the update; continued use after that date is acceptance. Prior versions are archived at https://autoconference.ai/legal. If you do not accept a change, you may close your account, subject to §13.1.

18.2 Severability. If a provision is unenforceable, it is modified to the minimum extent necessary or severed, and the rest remains in force.

18.3 No waiver. Our failure to enforce a provision is not a waiver of it.

18.4 Assignment. You may not assign these Terms. We may assign them to an affiliate or in connection with a merger, acquisition, or transfer of assets, on notice to you.

18.5 Entire agreement. These Terms and the documents incorporated in §1.2 are the entire agreement between us on this subject.

18.6 Contact. AutoConference.ai, AutoConference.ai (online; postal address available on request via legal@autoconference.ai) · General: support@autoconference.ai · Legal: legal@autoconference.ai · Privacy: privacy@autoconference.ai · Security: security@autoconference.ai