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Terms of use

Last updated 29 October 2026. Please read these terms carefully. They explain what you agree to when you use PubArx, what you are responsible for as an author or reviewer, and the limits of our responsibility.

1. About these terms

PubArx (pubarx.com) is run by the PubArx Community, a volunteer-run, not-for-profit scholarly initiative that is not currently a registered company. In these terms, “PubArx”, “we” and “us” mean the PubArx Community and the volunteers who operate the service on its behalf. “You” means anyone who visits or uses the site.

By creating an account, submitting a paper, posting a contribution or otherwise using PubArx, you agree to these terms, to our Privacy policy, our Copyright and takedown policy, the Screening policy and the Open review policy. If you do not agree, please do not use the service.

You must be at least 18 years old to create an account.

2. The service

  • PubArx is a free repository for research preprints. Every submission is checked by a moderator before publication. Screening is not peer review, and publication on PubArx does not mean that we endorse a paper or confirm that it is correct.
  • Authors may invite open community review. Reviews, endorsements and comments are the opinions of the people who write them, not of PubArx.
  • We do not charge authors or readers. Submission credits, scores, rankings and reviewer levels have no monetary value, cannot be bought, sold or transferred, and may be adjusted or removed if they were obtained by abuse.

3. Accounts

  • Use your real name and keep your details accurate. One person may hold one account.
  • Keep your password secret. You are responsible for activity on your account; tell us at once if you think it has been misused.
  • Link only an ORCID iD that belongs to you. Signing in with ORCID confirms that you control that ORCID record; it does not confirm your qualifications, expertise or affiliation.
  • We may suspend or close accounts that break these terms, for example accounts that impersonate others, operate several accounts or manipulate reviews, credits or rankings.

4. Your responsibilities as an author

When you submit a paper, you confirm, and you remain responsible for confirming, that:

  • Authorship. Every listed author has approved the submission, the licence and its public posting, and the author list, order and affiliations are accurate.
  • Rights. You own, or have permission for, every right needed to post the work under the licence you choose. This includes figures, tables, images, data, code and text taken from other sources, which you credit and, where they are under different terms, mark clearly.
  • Publisher agreements. Posting this version does not breach an agreement with a publisher, an embargo, a funder condition or any other obligation. Publishers often treat the submitted manuscript, the accepted manuscript and the published version of record differently; do not upload a publisher’s version of record unless its licence or the publisher allows it.
  • Confidentiality and personal data. The work contains no confidential or proprietary information you are not allowed to disclose, and no personal data about identifiable people without their consent or the approval required by law and research ethics.
  • Research integrity. The work is original, cites the work of others properly, and reports research that followed the ethics approvals and consent it required.
  • Lawfulness. The work does not infringe anyone’s rights, is not defamatory, and does not break any law that applies to you.

Patents and future publication. Posting a preprint is a public disclosure. It may affect your ability to obtain a patent and, in some cases, the policies of journals you submit to later. Check with your institution, funder or publisher before posting if this matters to you. A dated preprint documents when your work was made public; it is not a legal right of priority.

5. Licences

  • You keep your copyright. PubArx does not take ownership of your work.
  • The public licence you choose (for example CC BY 4.0) applies to readers. It covers only the rights that you and your co-authors hold. Material owned by others is not covered unless you say so.
  • Licence to PubArx. For every version you submit, you grant the PubArx Community a worldwide, royalty-free, non-exclusive, perpetual and irrevocable licence to store, copy, convert to other formats (for example for preservation or accessibility), display, distribute and make the work available to the public; to keep backup and preservation copies; and to let service providers that operate PubArx for us, or an organisation that takes over the service, do the same. This licence lets us keep published papers available. It does not let us sell your work or relicense it on other terms.
  • Metadata. You allow us to make a paper’s descriptive information (title, author names and affiliations, abstract, keywords, dates, identifiers and licence) freely available, including to search engines, indexing services and harvesters.
  • Creative Commons licences cannot be withdrawn. Once a version is public under a Creative Commons licence, people who obtained it may keep using it under that licence, even if the version is later withdrawn or access to it is restricted. See Licences.

6. Screening and publication

Moderators decide whether to publish a submission, ask for a revision or decline it, following the Screening policy. We are not obliged to publish any submission. You can ask for a decision to be reconsidered as described in that policy.

7. Permanence, withdrawal and removal

Published versions are meant to stay part of the scholarly record so that they can be cited reliably. The following rules apply:

  • Before publication. You can withdraw a submission at any time before a decision, and delete drafts you have never submitted. Submissions that are not published are never made public. We keep records of submitted versions as explained in the Privacy policy.
  • After publication. You can post new versions at any time. To withdraw a paper, post a new version that explains the withdrawal (a short notice can replace the full text); we are happy to help. Earlier versions stay available so that citations remain valid. If there is a strong reason, for example a serious error that could cause harm or one of the cases in the next point, you can ask us to restrict access to earlier versions as well.
  • Restriction or removal by PubArx. We may restrict access to, or remove, all or part of a paper or contribution, temporarily or permanently, where the law requires it or where it is reasonably necessary to deal with infringement of copyright or other rights, privacy violations, research misconduct, a risk of serious harm, or a serious breach of these terms or our policies. The identifier is never reused; its page shows a notice and, where appropriate, the reason. We tell the submitter and explain how to respond.

8. Reviews, endorsements and comments

  • Contributions are public and signed with your name and ORCID iD. Write about the work, not the people, and be specific and respectful.
  • Declare conflicts of interest truthfully. Paid, coordinated, fake or retaliatory reviewing is forbidden.
  • Do not post defamatory statements, personal attacks, confidential information, other people’s personal data, or material you have no right to share.
  • You keep the copyright in your contributions and license them to the public under CC BY 4.0, so that they can be quoted and reused with attribution. You also grant us the licence in section 5 for them.
  • Reviewer levels, scores and rankings reflect activity on PubArx only. They are not a certification of expertise.
  • Moderators may hide contributions that break these rules; hidden contributions stay on record with a public reason. How to report a contribution, ask for a correction or appeal a decision is described in the Open review policy.

9. Acceptable use

Do not use PubArx to break the law or anyone’s rights; upload malware or files with active content; probe or attack the security of the service (please report vulnerabilities to us privately instead); collect personal data about users; send spam; impersonate others; or use automated tools in a way that degrades the service. Bulk access to metadata is available through our OAI-PMH interface.

If you believe content on PubArx infringes your copyright or other rights, follow the Copyright and takedown policy and write to legal@pubarx.com. Accounts that repeatedly infringe the rights of others will be closed.

11. Availability, changes and discontinuation

  • We work to keep PubArx available and to keep backups, but we do not guarantee that the service will be uninterrupted, error-free or available at all times, or that any content will be preserved.
  • We may change, add or remove features at any time.
  • We do not promise to run PubArx forever. If we decide to discontinue the service, we will announce it on the site at least three months in advance, so that you can download your papers and data. We will try, but cannot guarantee, to arrange continued access to published papers, for example through another repository. If the law, an authority or a serious security threat requires us to act sooner, we will give as much notice as we reasonably can.

12. Third-party services and indexing

Paper pages include metadata designed to support discovery by Google Scholar, search engines and OAI-PMH harvesters. Indexing by third parties is not guaranteed and is outside our control. Services such as ORCID and our hosting provider operate under their own terms. Links to other sites are provided for convenience; we are not responsible for their content.

13. Disclaimer

PubArx is provided free of charge, “as is” and “as available”. To the extent permitted by law, we give no warranty of any kind, express or implied, including about the accuracy, quality, legality or fitness for purpose of the service or of any paper or contribution. Papers have not necessarily been peer reviewed. Nothing on PubArx is professional, medical, legal or financial advice.

14. Limitation of liability

To the extent permitted by law, the PubArx Community and its volunteers are not liable for any indirect, incidental, special, consequential or punitive damages, or for any loss of data, reputation, opportunity, profits or revenue, arising from your use of PubArx or from content posted by others, even if we were told such loss was possible. Because the service is free, to the extent permitted by law our total liability for all claims relating to PubArx will not exceed 100 US dollars. Nothing in these terms limits liability that cannot be limited by law, or rights you have by law that cannot be waived.

15. Your responsibility for claims

To the extent permitted by law, you agree to indemnify and hold harmless the PubArx Community and its volunteers against claims, losses, damages and reasonable costs, including legal fees, that arise from content you submit or post, from your breach of these terms, or from your infringement of anyone’s rights.

16. Ending your use

You can stop using PubArx at any time and ask for your account to be deleted or anonymised as described in the Privacy policy. We may suspend or close your account if you break these terms. Sections 4, 5, 7, 8 and 13 to 18 continue to apply after your account ends, including to content you published.

17. Changes to these terms

We may update these terms. We will announce significant changes on the site, and where practical by email to registered users, at least 30 days before they take effect, unless a change is required sooner by law. If you keep using PubArx after a change takes effect, the updated terms apply to you. Each registration and submission records which version you accepted.

18. General

  • If any part of these terms cannot be enforced, the rest remains in force.
  • If we do not enforce a right immediately, we have not given it up.
  • We may transfer our rights and obligations to an organisation that continues the service, for example if the PubArx Community becomes a registered entity.
  • If you have a dispute with us, please contact us first at legal@pubarx.com; we will try to resolve it informally and in good faith.

19. Contact

Legal notices and copyright complaints: legal@pubarx.com. Privacy requests: privacy@pubarx.com. Everything else: Contact.