PLEASE READ THIS AGREEMENT CAREFULLY. This User
Agreement (hereinafter referred to as the “Agreement”) is entered into on the
Users date of registration on the Rayyan website, and is made by and between
the User and Qatar Computing Research Institute (hereinafter referred to as
"QCRI"), a centre of Qatar Foundation for Education, Science and
Community Development (hereinafter referred to as "QF").
Introduction to Rayyan Functionality
QCRI has
developed the Rayyan platform (rayyan.ai), it is a free service
that provides for:
A web
application to help users including but not limited to Systematic Reviewers, explore
and screen publication citations with the goal of but not limited to writing
systematic reviews and meta-analyses. To achieve such a goal, Rayyan offers a
large variety of features including creating a review, inviting collaborators
to a review, uploading citations in different formats, a dashboard of all
reviews, a workbench for a given review, citation navigation and exploration,
facet extraction from citations, facet-based filtering, free text search,
free-text labeling of citations, labeling of citations as included and
excluded, machine-learning based suggestions for exclusion/inclusion of
citations, collaborative decisions, and similarity graphs for citations using
attribute weights. More features will be added in future releases.
Terms and Conditions of this User Agreement
As a User of
Rayyan, you agree to be bound by the terms in this Agreement. By accepting the
terms at account registration, the User unconditionally agrees to ALL of these
terms, conditions and polices contained herein.
QCRI at its sole discretion may update these
terms, conditions and polices from time to time by posting them on the website.
QCRI will provide a 45-day written notice to Users by email only of any planned
and upcoming revisions or modifications to this Agreement. If in your sole discretion
determine that any of the foregoing changes to this Agreement renders the Rayyan
website unsuitable for continued use, you should request termination of your
account by creating a support ticket through the “Contact us” link in Rayyan
website with the subject “Account Termination”.
If you continue to use the website after the
changes become effective, you agree to become bound by the revised Agreement.
The
following capitalized terms have the following meaning set forth below.
These terms of
Service apply to all Users of the Service, irrespective whether the User is a
Content contributor or not. The Service includes all aspects of Rayyan offered
on the website.
QF/QCRI does not endorse any Content submitted to
the Service by any User, or any opinion, recommendation, or advice expressed therein,
and QF/QCRI expressly disclaims any and all liability in connection with
Content. QF/QCRI does not permit copyright infringing activities and infringement
of intellectual property rights on the Service, and QF/QCRI will remove all
Content if properly notified that such Content infringes on another’s
intellectual property rights.
The Service may contain links to third party
websites that are not controlled or owned by QF/QCRI. Therefore QF/QCRI assumes
no responsibility for, content, privacy policies, or practices of any third
party websites. In addition, QF/QCRI will not and cannot censor or edit the
content of any third-party site. By using the Service, you expressly relieve
QF/QCRI from any and all liability arising from your use of any third-party
website.
You agree not to use or launch any automated
system, including without limitation, web crawlers, or offline readers, that
accesses the Service in a manner that sends more requests to the Rayyan servers
in a given period of time than a human can reasonably produce in the same
period by using a conventional on-line web browser. Notwithstanding the foregoing,
QF/QCRI grants the operators of public search engines permission to use web
crawlers to copy materials from the site for the sole purpose of creating
publically available searchable indices of the materials. QF/QCRI reserves the
right to revoke these exceptions either generally or in specific cases.
Rayyan, may use any User data and information to evaluate and improve its
performance and expand its services.
The privacy policy statement applicable to Rayyan:
QF/QCRI
may collate meta data to better understand how
Rayyan’s Users use its website. QF/QCRI may also release its results of such meta data analysis in a paper or publication where by all
personally identifiable information has been anonymised, in a report on the website
usage trends.
Certain
Users of the Rayyan community may choose to interact with Rayyan in ways that
require QF/QCRI and others to know more about them. The amount and type of
information that QF/QCRI gathers from those Users depends on the nature of the
interaction. For example, when users request assistance or report issues about
their experience with Rayyan.
QF/QCRI
may disclose personally identifying or other information, only to the extent
necessary and in compliance with applicable law, to protect our websites and
operations (e.g., against cyber attacks), to protect the rights, privacy,
safety, or property of QF/QCRI and Rayyan Users, to enforce our terms of
service, and to pursue available legal remedies.
Automatic daily backups of the entire Rayyan database are stored on Amazon
Web Services to ensure data durability, with a 1-month retention policy.
Rayyan relies on cloud services like Microsoft Azure and
Amazon Web Services to securely store its database, logs and uploaded files, to
host and monitor the machines running Rayyan, and to send system emails. This Agreement
is bound by the agreements of such services which can be found here:
http://aws.amazon.com/agreement/
https://azure.microsoft.com/en-us/support/legal
https://www.heroku.com/policy/tos
https://pusher.com/legal/terms
In the process of using Rayyan, is
it likely that a User may upload Confidential Information such as unpublished
work and description of ongoing projects, which are not in the public domain. It
is the responsibility of the User to protect this Confidential Information by not sharing it with an untrusted entity. The security
and privacy of this information is as secure as the cloud services Rayyan uses
whereby a range of security measures including physical access restraints, help
to protect your personal information from unauthorized access, alteration,
disclosure, or destruction. QCRI also have a policy in place to prohibit
employees from viewing personal information without justification such as a
“Contact us” request.
Rayyan uses industry standard 2048-bit SSL encrypted
connections for all communication involving sensitive data such as sign up,
sign in, and change account details. However, you are responsible for
safeguarding any password/keys/credentials used to access Rayyan and for any
activities or actions under these credentials. We recommend the use of
"strong" passwords (passwords that use a combination of upper and
lower case letters, numbers and symbols). QF/QCRI cannot and will not be liable
for any loss or damage arising from your failure to comply with this guidance.
You must notify QCRI immediately if you think your
account has been stolen by someone else, by creating a support ticket through
the “Contact us” link in Rayyan website.
You affirm that you are either more than 18 years of
age, or an emancipated minor, or possess legal
parental or guardian consent, and are fully able and
competent to enter into the terms, conditions,
obligations, affirmations, representations, and warranties set
forth in this User Agreement, and to abide by and comply with these terms.
You must respect any collaborator you interact with
on this website.
You must refrain from using inappropriate
communication, e.g. obscene or offensive language.
You must not misrepresent your identity to others.
Knowingly provide false information when using the
website.
Users must comply with this code of conduct. QF/QCRI
reserves the right to disable a User account in the event of misconduct of this
code.
QF/QCRI is not party to any
dispute between you and another Rayyan User. You release QF/QCRI from any and all claims, demands
for damages of every kind and nature, known and unknown, suspected and
unsuspected, disclosed and undisclosed, arising out of or connected with any
dispute between you and another User.
Rayyan uses state of the art
technologies to keep the system up and running.
Temporary as well as permanent failures are immediately reported to the Rayyan
support team for immediate action. Users, at any time, can create a support
ticket through the “Contact us” link in Rayyan or the question mark icon
available at all times.
Response times:
Rayyan support operates Sunday-Thursday from 8 AM to 5 PM (Arabian Standard
Time, GMT +03:00). Tickets received during business hours are expected to be
handled within 1 business day. Otherwise, tickets may face some delays.
Down times:
Because Rayyan relies on other cloud services, it is bound to down times
obliged by these services. Examples are, but not limited to, the database
service which is bound to 1 hour downtime every month, and the Azure
platform service availability.
System upgrades:
Usually system upgrades are done without the requirement of suspending Rayyan.
However, there could be some exceptions.
The Services provided
by Rayyan are evolving, QCRI intends to strive to improve and enhance the
Services that Rayyan provides. Any changes to the Services, including the
release of new Rayyan features, are subject to these Terms.
In addition, Rayyan
may stop temporarily providing the Services (or any features within the
Services) without providing prior notice, during which a placeholder page will
be shown upon accessing Rayyan through any link.
We also retain the
right to create limits on use and storage at our sole discretion at any time
without prior notice to the User to keep the Service usage fair for all Users.
QF/QCRI retain the
right to discontinue the Service at any time. In such case an email will be
sent to users giving them a notice period to export all their data.
Copyright and other
relevant intellectual property rights (e.g. workflow) relating to services on
this website is owned by QCRI. Any copy of part or all of this website without attribution in any form
is prohibited. Reproduction of this website is prohibited.
Rayyan does not own User Content. The User retains the
copyright of their Content. The copyright of uploaded Content to the Users
account is preserved and persists as defined in the uploaded Content itself.
A User can get up to date information on how to cite
Rayyan from: rayyan.ai/cite
You agree that the use of the services shall be at
your sole risk to the fullest extent permitted by law, QF/QCRI, its officers,
directors, employees and agents disclaim all warranties, express or implied, in
connection with the Service and your use thereof, QF/QCRI makes no warranties
or representations about the accuracy or completeness of the site’s Content or
the content of any sites linked to this site and assumes no liability or
responsibility for any
a) Errors, mistakes, omissions or inaccuracies of
Content
b) Any bugs, viruses, Trojan horses, of the like that
may be transmitted to or through the Service by any third party,
c) Any loss or damage uncured as a result of the use of
the Content posted, or otherwise made available via the Service
d) QF/QCRI does not endorse, any product or service
advertised or offered by a third party through a hyperlink or featured in any
banner or other advertising
e) Personal injury or property damage, of any nature
whatsoever, resulting from your access to and use of the Service.
In no event shall QCRI, its officers, directors, employees
and agents be liable for any direct, indirect, incidental, special, punitive or
consequential damages whatsoever resulting from any (i) errors, mistakes or
inaccuracies, (ii) any interruption or cessation of the Service, (iii) any
bugs, viruses, Trojan horses or similar, that may be transmitted through the
Service by any third party. (iv) any errors or
omissions in any content or for any loss or damage of any kind incurred as a
result of your use of any content posted, emailed, transmitted, or otherwise
made available via the Service. The forgoing limitation of liability shall
apply to the fullest extent permitted by law in the applicable jurisdiction.
You specifically acknowledge that QF/QCRI shall not be liable for content or
the defamatory, offensive or illegal conduct of any third party and that the
risk of harm or damage from the foregoing rests entirely with you.
Rayyan is controlled and offered by QF/QCRI from its
facilities in Qatar. Those who access or use Rayyan from other jurisdictions do
so at their own volition and are responsible for compliance with local law.
To the extent permitted by applicable law, you agree
to defend, indemnify and hold harmless QCRI, and its parent QF, officers,
directors, employees and agents, from and against any and all claims, damages,
obligations, losses, liabilities, costs or debt, and expenses (including but
not limited to reasonable attorney’s fees) arising from: (i) your use of and
access to Rayyan; (ii) your violation of any term of these terms in this
Agreement; (iii) your violation of any third party right, including without limitation
any copyright, property, or privacy right; or (iv) any claim that your Content
caused damage to a third party. This defence and indemnification obligation
will survive this Agreement and your use of the Service.