Terms of Use and Service

1. Introduction

1.1 At Advances.In LTD, our mission is to promote a sustainable and equitable open access publishing model that financially compensates editors and reviewers for their work. The following terms of service cover all interactions and relationships among editors, reviewers, authors, visitors of our website and us.

1.2 These terms and conditions shall govern your use of our websites and our article submission system.

1.3 By using our websites and our online submission system, you accept these terms and conditions in full; accordingly, if you disagree with these terms and conditions or any part of these terms and conditions, you must not use our websites.

1.4 If you register with our websites and/or our article submission system, submit any material to our websites or use any of our websites services, we will ask you to expressly agree to these terms and conditions.

1.5 You must be at least 16 years of age to use our websites; by using our websites or agreeing to these terms and conditions, you warrant and represent to us that you are at least 16 years of age.

2. Copyright notice

2.2 Subject to the express provisions of these terms and conditions:

(a) we, together with our licensors, own and control all the copyright and other intellectual property rights in our websites and our article submission system and the material on our websites; and

(b) all the copyright and other intellectual property rights in our websites and our article submission system and the material on our websites are reserved.

3. Permission to use websites

3.1 You may:

(a) view pages from our websites in a web browser;

(b) download pages from our websites for caching in a web browser;

(d) stream audio and video files from our websites using the media player on our websites;

(e) use our websites services including our article submission system by means of a web browser; and

(f) read and download articles in various formats;,

subject to the other provisions of these terms and conditions.

3.2 Except as expressly permitted by Section 3.1 or the other provisions of these terms and conditions, you must not download any material from our websites or save any such material to your computer.

3.3 You may only use our websites for your own personal and business purposes; you must not use our websites for any other purposes.

3.4 Except as expressly permitted by these terms and conditions, you must not edit or otherwise modify any material on our websites.

3.5 Unless you own or control the relevant rights in the material or the the CC-by license is applied, you must not:

(a) republish material from our websites (including republication on another websites);

(b) sell, rent or sub-license material from our websites;

(d) exploit material from our websites for a commercial purpose; or

(e) redistribute material from our websites.

3.6 Notwithstanding Section 3.5, you may redistribute any material, including all journal publications that have DOI numbers and are published under the CC-by license in print and electronic form to any person.

3.7 We reserve the right to suspend or restrict access to our websites and services, to areas of our websites and/or to functionality upon our websites and services. We may, for example, suspend access to the websites and services during server maintenance or when we update the websites. You must not circumvent or bypass, or attempt to circumvent or bypass, any access restriction measures on the websites.

4. Feeds

4.1 You may access our RSS and Atom feeds using any compatible feed reader or aggregator.

4.2 By accessing our feeds, you accept these terms and conditions.

4.3 Subject to your acceptance of these terms and conditions, we grant to you a non-exclusive, non-transferable, non-sub-licensable licence to display content from our feeds in unmodified form on any non-commercial websites owned and operated by you.

4.4 It is a condition of this licence that you include a credit for us and hyperlink to our websites on each web page where our feed content is published (in such form as we may specify from time to time, or if we do not specify any particular form, in a reasonable form).

4.5 We may revoke any licence relating to our feeds or feed content at any time, with or without notice.

5. Social media platforms

5.1 Our websites includes features that enable users to interact with social media platforms – including Facebook, Instagram, Twitter, YouTube, LinkedIn, Reddit – directly from our websites.

5.2 Using the social media features on our websites, you may:

(a) share data or content from our websites; and

(b) like or upvote content from our websites.

5.3 You acknowledge that the use of the social media platforms is subject to the terms and conditions of the relevant platform operator and that the use of any personal data transferred to the platforms is subject to the privacy policy or notice of the relevant platform operator.

5.4 Subject to Section 15.1, we will not be liable to you for any loss or damage arising out of:

(a) your use of any social media platform; and

(b) any act or omission of any social media platform operator.

5.5 When using social media features on our websites or browsing pages on our websites that incorporate social media features, the social media platforms may collect information about you and your use of our websites and those features, including by means of cookies. For more information about these cookies and the use of personal data collected by us and by the platforms, see our privacy and cookies policy.

6. Misuse of websites and our services

6.1 You must not:

(a) use our websites and our services in any way or take any action that causes, or may cause, damage to the websites and services or impairment of the performance, availability, accessibility, integrity or security of the websites and services;

(b) use our websites and services in any way that is unlawful, illegal, fraudulent or harmful, or in connection with any unlawful, illegal, fraudulent or harmful purpose or activity;

(d) probe, scan or test the vulnerability of our websites and services without our permission;

(e) circumvent any authentication or security systems or processes on or relating to our websites and services;

(f) use our websites or services to copy, store, host, transmit, send, use, publish or distribute any material which consists of (or is linked to) any spyware, computer virus, Trojan horse, worm, keystroke logger, rootkit or other malicious computer software;

(g) impose an unreasonably large load on our websites resources and services (including bandwidth, storage capacity and processing capacity);

(h) decrypt or decipher any communications sent by or to our websites and services without our permission;

(i) conduct any systematic or automated data collection activities (including without limitation scraping, data mining, data extraction and data harvesting) on or in relation to our websites and services without our express written consent;

(j) access or otherwise interact with our websites and services using any robot, spider or other automated means, except for the purpose of search engine indexing;

(k) use our websites and services except by means of our public interfaces;

(l) violate the directives set out in the robots.txt file for our websites;

(m) use data collected from our websites or services for any direct marketing activity (including without limitation email marketing, SMS marketing, telemarketing and direct mailing); or

(n) do anything that interferes with the normal use of our websites and services.

6.2 You must not use data collected from our websites or services to contact individuals, companies or other persons or entities.

6.3 You must ensure that all the information you supply to us through our websites and services, or in relation to our websites and services, is true, accurate, current, complete and non-misleading.

7. Registration and accounts

7.1 To be eligible for an account on our websites and our services under this Section 7, you must as a minimum hold a PhD.

7.2 You may register for an account with our websites and services by completing and submitting the account registration form on our websites or article submission system, and linking your account to your ORCID profile.

7.3 You must not allow any other person to use your account to access the websites and our services.

7.4 You must notify us in writing immediately if you become aware of any unauthorised use of your account.

7.5 You must not use any other person’s account to access the websites.

7.6 Different from most journals, we compensate both editors and reviewers for their consulting work. To be paid for your work, you have to sign a consultation agreement that we provide to you before you start your work.

7.7 The consultation agreement regulates the specific deliverables, conditions, and payment.

7.8 Authors of submitted content are not paid but required to pay an Article Processing Charge as described in Clause 12.

8. User login details

8.1 If you register for an account with our websites, you will be asked to choose a user ID and password.

8.2 Your user ID must not be liable to mislead and must comply with the content rules set out in Section 11; you must not use your account or user ID for or in connection with the impersonation of any person.

8.3 You must keep your password confidential.

8.4 You must notify us in writing immediately if you become aware of any disclosure of your password.

8.5 You are responsible for any activity on our websites and our services arising out of any failure to keep your password confidential, and may be held liable for any losses arising out of such a failure.

9. Cancellation and suspension of account

9.1 We may:

(a) suspend your account;

(b) cancel your account; and/or

at any time in our sole discretion with or without notice to you.

10. Our rights to use your content

10.1 In these terms and conditions, “your content” means all works and materials (including without limitation text, graphics, images, audio material, video material, audio-visual material, scripts, software and files) that you submit to us or our websites and service for storage or publication on, processing by, or transmission via, our websites and services.

10.2 You grant to us a worldwide, irrevocable, non-exclusive, royalty-free CC-by licence to use, reproduce, store, adapt, publish, translate and distribute your content in any existing or future media.

10.3 You grant to us the right to sub-license the rights licensed under Section 10.2.

10.4 You hereby waive all your moral rights in your content to the maximum extent permitted by applicable law; and you warrant and represent that all other moral rights in your content have been waived to the maximum extent permitted by applicable law.

10.5 You may edit your content to the extent permitted using the editing functionality made available on our websites and services. However, content that has been published in one of our journals can only be changed with the written permission by us.

10.6 Without prejudice to our other rights under these terms and conditions, if you breach any provision of these terms and conditions in any way, or if we reasonably suspect that you have breached these terms and conditions in any way, we may delete, unpublish or edit any or all of your content. In case you paid an article processing charge, this charge will not be refunded.

10.7. We reserve the right to any editorial decision (rejection, revision, acceptance) regarding the publication of your paper.

11. Rules about your content

11.1 You warrant and represent that your content will comply with these terms and conditions.

11.2 Your content must not be illegal or unlawful, must not infringe any person’s legal rights, and must not be capable of giving rise to legal action against any person (in each case in any jurisdiction and under any applicable law).

11.3 Your content, and the use of your content by us in accordance with these terms and conditions, must not:

(a) be libellous or maliciously false;

(b) be obscene or indecent;

(c) infringe any copyright, moral right, database right, trade mark right, design right, right in passing off or other intellectual property right;

(d) infringe any right of confidence, right of privacy or right under data protection legislation;

(e) constitute negligent advice or contain any negligent statement;

(f) constitute an incitement to commit a crime, instructions for the commission of a crime or the promotion of criminal activity;

(g) be in contempt of any court or in breach of any court order;

(h) be in breach of racial or religious hatred or discrimination legislation;

(i) be in breach of official secrets legislation;

(j) be in breach of any contractual obligation owed to any person;

(k) depict violence in an explicit, graphic or gratuitous manner;

(l) be pornographic;

(m) be untrue, false, inaccurate or misleading;

(n) consist of or contain any instructions, advice or other information which may be acted upon and could, if acted upon, cause illness, injury or death, or any other loss or damage;

(o) constitute spam;

(p) be offensive, deceptive, fraudulent, threatening, abusive, harassing, anti-social, menacing, hateful, discriminatory or inflammatory; or

(q) cause annoyance, inconvenience or needless anxiety to any person.

11.4 Your content must be appropriate, civil and tasteful, and accord with generally accepted standards of etiquette and behaviour on the internet and common scientific norms and standards.

11.5 You must not use our websites or services to link to any websites or web page consisting of or containing material that would, were it posted on our websites, breach the provisions of these terms and conditions.

11.6 You must not submit to our websites, services and journals any material that is or has ever been the subject of any threatened or actual legal proceedings or other similar complaint.

11.7 When submitting a manuscript through our submission system, you guarantee that:

(a) the manuscript is original – that is, it has not been published in another journal or other outlet that may compromise its Creative Commons copyright;

(b) the manuscript is not currently submitted to and/or under consideration at another journal or similar outlet;

(c) you and all additional authors have consented with its submission to one of our journals including with the provision of additional information about the authors;

(d) that you are legally entitled to submit the manuscript to one of our journals and to grant us the rights outlined above;

(e) that permission to use any potential third-party materials was obtained. You agree to attach documentation of this permission to your submission or to provide it when requested;

(f) that all information in the manuscript is correct and accurate and complies with the highest ethical and scientific standards in your field;

(g) all information and data were obtained legally and comply with the laws and regulations of the authors’ country as well as of the UK;

(h) all authors of the paper agree that their names, affiliations and contact details may be published on our journal and third-party webpages;

(i) you acknowledge the contributions of other scholars or entities through citations whenever applicable.

12. Article Processing Charge

– 1 Publishing in our journals is conditional on authors paying an Article Processing Charge (APC). By submitting manuscript, you become liable to paying the APC within 30 days after the editorial decision to accept the paper. The APC can vary from journal to journal and is provided on the website of each journal.12.2 Upon acceptance of the article, the corresponding author who submitted the paper on behalf of themselves or other authors receives an invoice that needs to be made in full before a paper is published. Payment will take place via a third-party platform that we collaborate with. The payment of the APC is non-refundable and does not guarantee publication of the respective article.

13. Report abuse

13.1 If you learn of any unlawful material or activity on our websites and services, or any material or activity that breaches these terms and conditions, please let us know.

13.2 You can let us know about any such material or activity by email ([email protected]).

13.3 Our goal is to build a community of mutual respect and we aim to protect your rights. If you should feel that your rights have been infringed, please contact us immediately by email ([email protected]).

14. AI-generated content (“Ask AI”)

14.1 Articles on our websites may include an optional “Ask AI” feature that automatically generates answers to reader questions using a third-party large language model. Answers are generated solely from the text of the article in question, without human review.

14.2 AI-generated answers are provided for general information only, on an “as is” basis, and without any warranty of accuracy, completeness, or fitness for any particular purpose.

14.3 AI-generated answers are not part of the peer-reviewed article, and they do not represent the views of the journal, its editors, its reviewers, or the article’s authors. They do not constitute medical, psychological, legal, or any other form of professional advice, and must not be used as a basis for decisions about health, treatment, or personal circumstances. You should always verify AI-generated answers against the published article itself, and consult a qualified professional for advice about personal circumstances.

14.4 Without prejudice to Section 16, and to the fullest extent permitted by applicable law, we accept no liability for any loss or damage arising from reliance on AI-generated answers.

14.5 Questions submitted to the “Ask AI” feature are stored for up to 12 months for quality assurance and service improvement. Submissions are not linked to your name or account, and IP addresses are processed only in irreversibly hashed form for rate limiting. You must not include personal information in questions.

15. Limited warranties

15.1 We do not warrant or represent:

(a) the completeness or accuracy of the information published on our websites and services;

(b) that the material on the websites and services is up to date;

(d) that the websites or any service on the websites will remain available.

15.2 We reserve the right to discontinue or alter any or all of our websites and publishing services, and to stop publishing our websites, at any time in our sole discretion without notice or explanation; and save to the extent expressly provided otherwise in these terms and conditions, you will not be entitled to any compensation or other payment upon the discontinuance or alteration of any websites services, or if we stop publishing the websites.

15.3 To the maximum extent permitted by applicable law and subject to Section 16.1, we exclude all representations and warranties relating to the subject matter of these terms and conditions, our websites and services and the use of our websites and services.

16. Limitations and exclusions of liability

16.1 Nothing in these terms and conditions will:

(a) limit or exclude any liability for death or personal injury resulting from negligence;

(b) limit or exclude any liability for fraud or fraudulent misrepresentation;

(d) exclude any liabilities that may not be excluded under applicable law.

16.2 The limitations and exclusions of liability set out in this Section 16 and elsewhere in these terms and conditions:

(a) are subject to Section 16.1; and

(b) govern all liabilities arising under these terms and conditions or relating to the subject matter of these terms and conditions, including liabilities arising in contract, in tort (including negligence) and for breach of statutory duty, except to the extent expressly provided otherwise in these terms and conditions.

16.3 To the extent that our websites and the information and services on our websites are provided free of charge, we will not be liable for any loss or damage of any nature.

16.4 We will not be liable to you in respect of any losses arising out of any event or events beyond our reasonable control.

16.5 We will not be liable to you in respect of any business losses, including (without limitation) loss of or damage to profits, income, revenue, use, production, anticipated savings, business, contracts, commercial opportunities or goodwill.

16.6 We will not be liable to you in respect of any loss or corruption of any data, database or software.

16.7 We will not be liable to you in respect of any special, indirect or consequential loss or damage.

16.8 You accept that we have an interest in limiting the personal liability of our officers and employees and, having regard to that interest, you acknowledge that we are a limited liability entity; you agree that you will not bring any claim personally against our officers or employees in respect of any losses you suffer in connection with the websites or these terms and conditions (this will not, of course, limit or exclude the liability of the limited liability entity itself for the acts and omissions of our officers and employees).

17. Indemnity

17.1 You hereby indemnify us, and undertake to keep us indemnified, against any and all losses, damages, costs, liabilities and expenses (including without limitation legal expenses and any amounts paid by us to a third party in settlement of a claim or dispute) incurred or suffered by us and arising directly or indirectly out of your use of our websites and services or any breach by you of any provision of these terms and conditions.

18. Breaches of these terms and conditions

18.1 Without prejudice to our other rights under these terms and conditions, if you breach these terms and conditions in any way, or if we reasonably suspect that you have breached these terms and conditions in any way, we may:

(a) send you one or more formal warnings;

(b) temporarily suspend your access to our websites and services;

(d) block computers using your IP address from accessing our websites and services;

(e) contact any or all of your internet service providers and request that they block your access to our websites and services;

(f) commence legal action against you, whether for breach of contract or otherwise; and/or

(g) suspend or delete your account on our websites and services.

18.2 Where we suspend or prohibit or block your access to our websites or a part of our websites, you must not take any action to circumvent such suspension or prohibition or blocking (including without limitation creating and/or using a different account).

19. Third party websites

19.1 Our websites include hyperlinks to other websites owned and operated by third parties; such hyperlinks are not recommendations.

19.2 We have no control over third party websites and their contents, and subject to Section 16.1 we accept no responsibility for them or for any loss or damage that may arise from your use of them.

20. Trade marks

20.1 “Advances.in” and “Advances.in Reinventing Academic Publishing”, our logos and our other registered and unregistered trade marks are trade marks belonging to us; we give no permission for the use of these trade marks, and such use may constitute an infringement of our rights.

20.2 The third party registered and unregistered trade marks or service marks on our websites are the property of their respective owners and, unless stated otherwise in these terms and conditions, we do not endorse and are not affiliated with any of the holders of any such rights and as such we cannot grant any licence to exercise such rights.

21. Variation

21.1 We may revise these terms and conditions from time to time.

21.2 The revised terms and conditions shall apply to the use of our websites and services from the date of publication of the revised terms and conditions on the websites, and you hereby waive any right you may otherwise have to be notified of, or to consent to, revisions of these terms and conditions.

21.3 If you have given your express agreement to these terms and conditions, we will ask for your express agreement to any revision of these terms and conditions; and if you do not give your express agreement to the revised terms and conditions within such period as we may specify, we will disable or delete your account on the websites and services, and you must stop using the websites and services.

22. Assignment

22.1 You hereby agree that we may assign, transfer, sub-contract or otherwise deal with our rights and/or obligations under these terms and conditions.

22.2 You may not without our prior written consent assign, transfer, sub-contract or otherwise deal with any of your rights and/or obligations under these terms and conditions.

23. Severability

23.1 If a provision of these terms and conditions is determined by any court or other competent authority to be unlawful and/or unenforceable, the other provisions will continue in effect.

23.2 If any unlawful and/or unenforceable provision of these terms and conditions would be lawful or enforceable if part of it were deleted, that part will be deemed to be deleted, and the rest of the provision will continue in effect.

24. Third party rights

24.1 A contract under these terms and conditions is for our benefit and your benefit, and is not intended to benefit or be enforceable by any third party.

24.2 The exercise of the parties’ rights under a contract under these terms and conditions is not subject to the consent of any third party.

25. Entire agreement

25.1 Subject to Section 16.1, these terms and conditions, together with our privacy and cookies policy, shall constitute the entire agreement between you and us in relation to your use of our websites and services and shall supersede all previous agreements between you and us in relation to your use of our websites and services.

26. Law and jurisdiction

26.1 These terms and conditions shall be governed by and construed in accordance with English law.

26.2 Any disputes relating to these terms and conditions shall be subject to the exclusive jurisdiction of the courts of England.

27. Statutory and regulatory disclosures

27.1 We are registered in Companies House,; you can find the online version of the register at https://find-and-update.company-information.service.gov.uk/company/14114105, and our registration number is 14114105.

28. Our details

28.1 This websites are owned and operated by Advances.in LTD.

28.2 We are registered in England and Wales under registration number 14114105, and our registered office is at 71-75 Shelton Street, Covent Garden, London, United Kingdom, WC2H 9JQ.

28.3 Our principal place of business is at 71-75 Shelton Street, Covent Garden, London, United Kingdom, WC2H 9JQ.

28.4 You can contact us:

(a) by post, to the postal address given above;

(b) using our websites contact form; or