Terms of Service

These Terms of Service (the “Terms”) govern your access to and use of CiteFirm, including its website, applications, and citation-verification features (the “Service”). By creating an account, starting a trial, purchasing a subscription, or otherwise using the Service, you agree to these Terms and our Privacy Policy. If you do not agree, do not use the Service.

The Service is provided by PaperSmith LLC, doing business as CiteFirm (“CiteFirm,” “we,” “us,” or “our”). References to CiteFirm in these Terms mean that entity.

You must be at least 16 years old and legally able to enter into this agreement. If you use CiteFirm for an institution or organization, you confirm that you have authority to bind it to these Terms.

You sign in through a supported account method, currently email/password, Google, or ORCID. You are responsible for activity under your account and for keeping access to that account secure. Account information must be accurate, and you may not transfer or share an account in a way that bypasses plan limits.

CiteFirm uses automated systems to extract citations and claims from academic work, locate potentially relevant source passages, and package the results into a reviewable verification record. Depending on the feature, you may upload manuscripts and source PDFs, import or export CiteFirm verification (.cfv) files, and retrieve publicly available research metadata or source material.

Features, supported file formats, usage limits, and third-party integrations may change as the Service develops. Any plan-specific terms shown at checkout or in the Service form part of these Terms.

• Free access: you may upload papers, extract citations and references, upload source PDFs, add manual annotations, and import, view, edit, or export .cfv files. AI verification features require an eligible trial, paid subscription, or complimentary access.
• 30-day trial: starting a trial requires a payment method through Stripe. Unless you cancel before the trial ends, the trial automatically becomes a paid monthly Pro subscription and Stripe charges the price and any applicable tax shown at checkout.
• Pro: the subscription renews monthly until cancelled. Current usage limits and plan features are described in the Service and at checkout and may change as described in these Terms. Deleting a project does not restore a used AI verification run.

You authorize Stripe to charge your selected payment method for recurring fees and taxes. You can cancel at any time through the billing portal in CiteFirm. Cancellation prevents the next renewal or post-trial charge and normally takes effect at the end of the current trial or paid period; it does not retroactively refund prior charges.

Except where law requires otherwise, fees already paid are non-refundable. We may change prices or plan limits prospectively with reasonable notice. If a payment fails, access to paid features may be limited or suspended.

You retain any rights you hold in manuscripts, references, PDFs, .cfv files, and other material you submit (“Your Content”). You give CiteFirm a limited, non-exclusive license to host, copy, parse, transmit, and otherwise process Your Content only as needed to operate, secure, support, and improve the Service. This permission ends when the content is deleted, subject to reasonable backup, security, and legal-retention periods.

To be specific about that processing: we do not use Your Content to train artificial- intelligence models, whether our own or a third party’s. Portions of Your Content are shared with the third-party providers that operate parts of the Service — for example, text is sent to OpenAI’s API for citation and passage analysis, and files and records are processed by our hosting and storage providers — only so those providers can perform those functions on our behalf, as described in our Privacy Policy. Your Content is retained while your account is active or until you delete it; after deletion, limited copies may persist temporarily in backups, logs, and disaster-recovery systems as described in the Privacy Policy.

You are responsible for ensuring that you have the rights and permissions needed to submit, store, and process Your Content in CiteFirm. This includes PDFs obtained through a publisher, subscription, library, employer, university, or other institution. Access to a paywalled paper does not necessarily mean you may upload it to a third-party service; you should check any applicable license, contract, or institutional policy.

Manually uploaded source and reference PDFs are stored as private account or project content and are not added to CiteFirm’s shared open-access cache. CiteFirm may separately retrieve and cache source files only when it has recorded open-access provenance for the file, such as a repository or metadata service indicating that the file is available for reuse or automated access. Exported .cfv files and reports may contain text and data from your projects; review them before sharing.

Researchers often work with unpublished manuscripts, drafts under peer review, grant applications, and similar material that is confidential or subject to embargoes, publisher or funder agreements, or institutional policies. Do not upload unpublished or confidential material unless you are authorized to do so and have confirmed that processing it through a third-party service is consistent with any confidentiality obligation, review policy, or agreement that applies to it. You — not CiteFirm — are responsible for that determination.

Do not upload export-controlled, specially regulated, or highly sensitive personal information unless you have determined that using the Service for that material is appropriate and lawful.

You may not use the Service to:

• violate a law, contract, intellectual-property right, privacy right, or court order;
• upload, store, export, or share PDFs or other material you are not allowed to process in CiteFirm;
• use CiteFirm to bypass paywalls, authentication, access controls, DRM, robots rules, or publisher download limits;
• upload malware or material designed to disrupt, damage, or gain unauthorized access;
• probe, bypass, or interfere with security, authentication, quotas, or rate limits;
• scrape or access the Service through unauthorized automated means;
• resell or provide access to the Service unless we agree in writing; or
• misrepresent automated output as independently verified fact.

CiteFirm uses commercially reasonable administrative, technical, and organizational safeguards designed to protect the Service and Your Content. However, no online service, storage system, or method of transmission is completely secure, and CiteFirm cannot guarantee absolute security.

You are responsible for maintaining the security of the identity provider, email address, device, and credentials used to access your CiteFirm account. You should not share account access or allow others to use your account in a way that bypasses plan limits or security controls.

CiteFirm may suspend or restrict access to an account, project, or feature if we reasonably believe doing so is necessary to protect the Service, user content, other users, third-party systems, or CiteFirm from unauthorized access, security threats, legal risk, or misuse.

We may remove or restrict access to content, disable features, or suspend accounts when we reasonably believe content or activity infringes copyright, violates these Terms, or creates legal risk for CiteFirm or others.

If you believe material available through CiteFirm infringes your copyright, send a notice to contact@citefirm.com with enough information for us to identify the material and evaluate the claim. If CiteFirm registers a designated DMCA agent with the U.S. Copyright Office, DMCA notices should be sent to that agent using the contact information published by CiteFirm and in the Copyright Office directory.

CiteFirm may terminate or restrict accounts of users who repeatedly infringe or repeatedly submit content that we remove for copyright reasons. Users who believe their material was removed by mistake may contact us with a counter-notice or explanation.

Verification results are generated with automated and probabilistic systems. A result may omit a relevant passage, select the wrong source or version, misunderstand a claim, or reach an incorrect support classification. A “supported” result is not a guarantee that a citation is accurate, complete, methodologically sound, or suitable for publication.

CiteFirm is a research aid, not a substitute for reading sources or applying independent academic and professional judgment. CiteFirm does not provide academic, legal, editorial, peer-review, plagiarism-detection, or publication-readiness review or certification, and its output is not any of those things. You are responsible for reviewing results and for any manuscript, citation, decision, or representation based on them.

CiteFirm and its software, design, branding, and documentation are owned by us or our licensors and are protected by applicable laws. These Terms give you a limited, non-transferable right to use the Service; they do not transfer ownership of the Service or of Your Content.

If you send suggestions or feedback, you allow us to use it without restriction or payment, but you are not required to provide feedback.

The Service relies on third parties for functions such as artificial-intelligence processing, authentication, payments, hosting, storage, error monitoring, and research discovery. It may also link to or retrieve material from publishers, repositories, libraries, and other sites. We do not control those services or guarantee the availability, accuracy, licensing status, or safety of third-party material. Their own terms and policies may apply.

If you configure institutional access, CiteFirm may help construct links to your institution’s access gateway, but you remain responsible for complying with the terms that apply to that access. CiteFirm does not promise that a linked or downloaded source is authorized for every use.

We may add, change, limit, or discontinue features and may perform maintenance that makes the Service temporarily unavailable. When reasonably possible, we will give advance notice of a material change that significantly reduces a paid feature. You should keep copies of research and verification records you need; CiteFirm is not an archival repository.

You may stop using the Service at any time and may request account deletion by contacting us. We may suspend or terminate access when we reasonably believe you have violated these Terms, created risk or legal exposure, failed to pay, or threatened the security or operation of the Service. Where practical, we will provide notice and an opportunity to address the issue.

Provisions that logically need to continue—including ownership, payment obligations, disclaimers, and liability limits—survive termination.

To the maximum extent allowed by law, the Service and all results are provided “as is” and “as available.” We disclaim all express and implied warranties, including merchantability, fitness for a particular purpose, title, non-infringement, accuracy, and uninterrupted or error-free operation. We do not warrant that CiteFirm will find every citation or source, or that its output will satisfy any publisher, institution, funder, or professional standard.

Some jurisdictions do not allow certain warranty exclusions, so some of these exclusions may not apply to you.

To the maximum extent allowed by law, CiteFirm will not be liable for indirect, incidental, special, consequential, exemplary, or punitive damages, or for lost profits, revenue, data, goodwill, publications, or opportunities arising from or related to the Service.

Our total liability for all claims arising out of or relating to the Service will not exceed the greater of (a) the amount you paid CiteFirm in the 12 months before the event giving rise to the claim or (b) US $100. These limits do not apply where liability cannot legally be limited, including any liability that applicable law prohibits us from excluding.

If any provision of these Terms is unenforceable, the remaining provisions remain in effect. A delay in enforcing a provision is not a waiver. You may not assign these Terms without our consent; we may assign them as part of a merger, acquisition, reorganization, or transfer of the Service. These Terms and any plan details presented at checkout are the entire agreement about the Service, unless we separately agree in writing.

We may update these Terms. If a change is material, we will provide reasonable notice in the Service or through available contact information before it takes effect. Continued use after the effective date means you accept the revised Terms.

Questions, notices, or account-deletion requests may be sent to contact@citefirm.com.