Terms of Use · MyGuide

These terms apply to MyGuide at ai.researchramp.com (the "platform"), a service of Research Ramp Private Limited. Where they differ from the general policies on researchramp.com, these terms decide for the platform.

These terms are a binding agreement between you and Research Ramp Private Limited ("Research Ramp", "we", "us"), West Block, 3rd floor, 3sw1, 004 Unit, Mani Casadona, 11F, 04, Street Number 372, Action Area I, IIF, Newtown, Kolkata, Chakpachuria, West Bengal 700160, India, for your use of this platform and its services. By ticking the box when you start a paper, logging in, or paying, you accept these terms, our Privacy Policy and our Refund and Cancellation Policy. If you do not accept them, please do not use the platform. We have written them in plain words; please read them.

This document is an electronic record under the Information Technology Act, 2000 and the rules made under it, and needs no physical or digital signature.

1. Who may use the platform

You must be at least 18 years old and able to enter a binding contract.
If you use the platform for a university, company or other organisation, you confirm you are allowed to accept these terms for it.
The details you give us must be true and kept up to date.

2. What the platform does

The platform supports researchers through publication: it suggests and checks journals, finds research topics and datasets, checks data, supports analysis and writing, makes and checks figures, checks references, manuscripts and journal formatting, edits language, prepares submission files and helps with revisions. Parts of this work are done with artificial intelligence (AI), as explained in our Privacy Policy. We may add, change or withdraw features; if we withdraw a feature you have paid for and not received, we refund it as our Refund and Cancellation Policy sets out.

3. Results need your judgement: everything we deliver is a draft

Every result and file we deliver is a draft for you to work on, not a finished paper ready to submit. Before you send anything to a journal, university, funder or anyone else, you must read it in full, check every fact, number, quotation and reference against your own data and sources, change whatever needs changing, and make it your own. Do not submit any file as it was delivered without doing this.
Submitting is always your decision and your act. Once you submit, the submitted work is yours, and so is responsibility for it.
Results are produced with AI and automated checks, reviewed against our methods. They can still contain mistakes. You must read and check every result before you rely on it or send it to anyone.
Our results are publishing support. They are not legal, medical, financial, ethical or statistical advice for any decision outside your manuscript, and they do not replace your supervisor, ethics committee, statistician or institution.
Journal facts (scope, indexing, quartiles, fees, policies) come from public and third-party sources, are checked on the date shown, and can change after that date. We are not responsible for errors in those sources or for later changes.

4. No guarantee of acceptance

Journals make their own decisions. We do not promise that a paper will be accepted, published, indexed, cited or accepted within any time, and a rejection is not a fault in our service. Scores we give (such as journal fit and manuscript quality) are our assessment, not a prediction of a journal's decision.

5. You stay the author, and honest research

Your paper is your work. You decide its question, approve each step, and are solely responsible for what you submit, including authorship, originality, data, ethics, consent, conflicts of interest and declarations.
You must follow the rules of your journal and institution, including on AI use. Where AI helped, you must declare it as they require; we prepare an accurate declaration for you to check.
We do not sell authorship, add authors who did not qualify, supply fabricated or manipulated data, write papers to be passed off as someone else's, or help anyone get around a journal's or institution's rules. We may refuse or stop any work that we reasonably believe would breach research integrity. If the breach is yours, no refund is given (see section 6).

6. What you promise us

You own, or have permission to use, everything you upload, and uploading and our processing of it breaks no law, contract, copyright, confidentiality duty or other person's rights.
Your data is genuine and collected as you describe. You will not ask us to create, alter or disguise data. If our checks find data that looks fabricated, we stop the work.
Any personal data about other people in your files (for example study participants) was collected lawfully, with the consent and ethics approval the law and your institution require, and is anonymised wherever possible.
Studies with people or animals had the ethics approval you tell us about, granted before the data was collected.

If you break these promises, the paid fees for that work are not refundable and we may close your account.

7. Things you must not do

Copy, scrape, extract, reverse engineer or try to reveal the platform's methods, scoring, internal rules or instructions, including by giving it instructions meant to make it disclose them.
Use bots, scripts or other automated means to access the platform, or get around usage limits, free-result limits, logins or security (for example by using many email addresses).
Resell, sublicense or offer the platform or its results as a service to others, or use them to build or train a competing product or AI model.
Upload anything unlawful, harmful, infringing, or containing malware, or anyone's personal data without a lawful basis.
Use the platform for paper mills, ghost authorship, citation manipulation, fake peer review or any other academic misconduct.

8. Your account

You log in with a one-time code sent to your email. You are responsible for everything done through your account, so keep access to your email secure. Tell us at once at contact@researchramp.com if you think someone else has used it.

9. Free results, prices, plans and payment

One result is free for each email address, so you can see its value. Warnings about unsafe journals, data problems, missing ethics approval or a likely null result are always shown free. We may change or end free results at any time.
Prices are shown before you pay. In India prices are in rupees and GST is added on top; elsewhere prices are in US dollars, and any tax due in your country is your responsibility unless we collect it at checkout.
Monthly plans: paid work needs a monthly plan (Basic, Plus or Pro, each with a different amount of usage). Each plan adds a set amount of usage each week of the plan month; usage you do not use carries over to the following weeks of the same plan month and ends when that month ends. Each job uses part of your usage, depending on the work it takes; we show the usual amount before you start. In India the plan renews automatically each month and charges your chosen payment method until you cancel; in US dollars it is paid one month at a time. You can cancel at any time in your account; cancelling stops the next charge and your plan stays active until the end of the month already paid for.
Human editor review: a one-time payment for a detailed review of your final manuscript, with recommendations, by our editors. We confirm the delivery date within one working day of your order. It includes extra usage worth the amount shown when you order, which you can use with or without a plan.
Pay as you go and extra usage: usage can be bought with or without a plan. It stays until used and, on a plan, is used only after the plan's usage runs out. Usage, whether from the plan or bought, can be used only on this platform, has no cash value, and cannot be transferred or exchanged for money.
We may change prices. A new price applies to plans from your next renewal after we tell you by email, and never to a job you have already paid for.
Payments are processed by Razorpay, Stripe or PayPal under their own terms. We never see or keep your full card details.
All payments are final and not refundable, except in the few cases the law requires, which are set out in our Refund and Cancellation Policy. If you dispute a payment with your bank without first contacting us, we may pause your account while the dispute is open.

10. Who owns what

Yours: you keep all rights in your manuscripts, data and other files. You give us a limited, non-exclusive permission to store, copy and process them only to provide the service to you, and for no other purpose. We never use them to train AI.
Results: once paid for (or given free), the results made for your paper are yours to use for that paper and your own research.
Ours: the platform, its design, software, methods, scoring, rules, templates and brand belong to us or our licensors. These terms give you no rights in them beyond using the platform as allowed here.
Suggestions: if you send us ideas or feedback, we may use them freely without paying you.

11. Confidentiality

We keep your files and research confidential and share them only as our Privacy Policy describes or as the law requires. A signed non-disclosure agreement is available on request.

12. Services of others

The platform links to or relies on services we do not control, such as journal websites, research databases, data repositories and payment providers. We are not responsible for their content, availability or actions.

13. Service "as is"

We work carefully and with reasonable skill, but as far as the law allows the platform and results are provided "as is" and "as available", without any promise that they will be uninterrupted, error-free or fit for a particular purpose beyond what these terms say. Nothing here removes rights you have under consumer protection law that cannot be removed.

14. Limits of our responsibility

As far as the law allows, we are not responsible for indirect or consequential losses, or for loss of opportunity, reputation, funding, degree, job, publication, time or data, including losses from a rejection, a delay, a journal's decision or your use of a result without checking it.
As far as the law allows, our total responsibility to you for all claims together is limited to the amount you paid us for the service the claim relates to in the 12 months before the claim arose.
These limits do not apply to death or personal injury caused by our negligence, to fraud, or to any responsibility that cannot be limited by law.

15. Your responsibility to us

You agree to cover our reasonable losses, costs and legal fees arising from a claim by anyone else that is caused by your files, your breach of these terms, your breach of anyone's rights (such as copyright or privacy), or your research misconduct.

16. Events beyond our control

We are not responsible for delays or failures caused by events beyond our reasonable control, such as outages of internet, hosting, AI or payment providers, natural disasters, epidemics, government action or strikes. If such an event stops a paid job for more than 30 days, the Refund and Cancellation Policy applies to the part not delivered.

17. Suspending or closing accounts

We may suspend or close an account, with notice where reasonable, if it breaks these terms, abuses the service, puts other users or the platform at risk, or if the law requires it. You may stop using the platform and ask us to delete your account at any time. Sections that by their nature should continue (such as 6, 10, 14, 15 and 18) continue after an account is closed.

18. Disagreements

Please contact us first at contact@researchramp.com. We will try in good faith to settle any disagreement within 30 days.
If it is not settled, either side may refer it to arbitration by a sole arbitrator under the Arbitration and Conciliation Act, 1996, seated in Kolkata, in English. This does not stop either side asking a court for urgent relief, or you using a consumer forum where the law gives you that right.
These terms are governed by the law of India, and subject to the above the courts of Kolkata, West Bengal have exclusive jurisdiction.

19. Changes to these terms

We may update these terms. If a change matters, we tell you by email or on the platform before it applies; using the platform after that means you accept the new terms. The version you accepted is recorded with each paper.

20. General

These terms, the Privacy Policy and the Refund and Cancellation Policy are the whole agreement between us about the platform.
If any part is found unenforceable, the rest still applies. If we do not enforce a right at once, we can still enforce it later.
You may not transfer your rights under these terms without our written agreement; we may transfer ours to a business that takes over the platform, and we will tell you.
If these terms are translated, the English version decides any difference.

21. Contact

Research Ramp Private Limited, West Block, 3rd floor, 3sw1, 004 Unit, Mani Casadona, 11F, 04, Street Number 372, Action Area I, IIF, Newtown, Kolkata, Chakpachuria, West Bengal 700160, India. Email: contact@researchramp.com.