Terms of service

1. This agreement

These terms are a contract between you and Oslr Ltd, a company registered in England and Wales ("Oslr", "we", "us"), covering the Paper Scout mobile apps, the Paper Scout web app and this website (together, the "Service").

By creating an account or using the Service you agree to these terms and to our privacy policy. If you do not agree, please do not use the Service.

If you download Paper Scout from the Apple App Store, Apple's Licensed Application End User Licence Agreement also applies; where it conflicts with these terms in respect of the iOS app, Apple's agreement takes precedence. See section 13.

2. Who may use Paper Scout

You must be at least 16 years old and able to form a binding contract. If you are using Paper Scout in the course of your employment or academic post, you confirm you are authorised to accept these terms on behalf of your organisation for that use.

The Service is offered worldwide but is built around biomedical literature indexed in PubMed and is provided in English. You are responsible for complying with the laws that apply to you, including any rules your institution has about third-party research tools.

3. What the Service does

Paper Scout takes a description of your research interests and uses it to search PubMed, screen the results and rank them with large language models, producing a personalised feed in which each paper carries a short, machine-written reason for its inclusion. It also offers a reading list, spoken summaries and briefings, a facility for diagnosing why a particular paper was not surfaced, and tools for adjusting your interests over time.

Paper Scout is under active development. We may add, change, or remove features, and we may impose reasonable usage limits to keep the Service available and affordable for everyone. Where a limit applies to you, the Service will tell you it has been reached rather than quietly returning a reduced result.

4. Your account

You sign in with Google or Apple. You are responsible for the security of that account and for activity that happens under it. Tell us at support@paperscout.net if you believe it has been compromised.

One account is for one person. Please don't share credentials, and don't create accounts by automated means.

You can delete your account at any time from Account → Delete Account in the app. What that removes, and what is retained, is set out in the privacy policy.

5. What Paper Scout is not

This section matters more than the rest, so it is written plainly.

Not medical or professional advice

Paper Scout surfaces and summarises scientific literature. Nothing it produces is medical, clinical, diagnostic, legal or professional advice, and none of it should be used to make a decision about the care of any patient. Clinical decisions must be based on the primary literature, professional judgement, and the guidelines that apply to your practice. If you are a patient, speak to a qualified healthcare professional.

Not a guarantee of completeness

No filter is perfect, and we would rather say so on the front page than bury it here. Paper Scout can miss papers, and it has specific, documented ways of doing so: a paper may fall outside the search window, never be retrieved by the queries written for you, be dropped at the title screen, be scored too low, or be lost to a retrieval limit. It also only searches PubMed, so anything not indexed there is invisible to it. Paper Scout is not a systematic review tool and must not be relied on as an exhaustive search of the literature for a review, a regulatory submission, a grant, or any purpose where completeness is required.

AI output can be wrong

Relevance scores, the reason attached to each paper, spoken summaries, briefings and the analysis in a miss diagnosis are all generated by large language models. They can be inaccurate, incomplete or misleading. Treat them as a way of deciding what to open — not as a substitute for reading the paper. Always verify against the original publication before relying on or citing anything.

Not the publisher of the papers

Paper Scout displays bibliographic records and abstracts obtained from PubMed and other public sources. We are not the author or publisher of that content and are not responsible for its accuracy. Copyright in papers and abstracts remains with their rights holders, and access to full text is governed by the publisher's terms, not ours.

Not endorsed by NLM, NCBI, or any publisher

Paper Scout uses data from the U.S. National Library of Medicine's PubMed service and from OpenAlex. Neither the NLM, the National Institutes of Health, the U.S. Government, OpenAlex, nor any journal or publisher named in the Service endorses, sponsors or is affiliated with Paper Scout or Oslr Ltd. Journal names and trade marks belong to their owners and are used only to identify the source of a record.

6. Acceptable use

Please do not:

• scrape, crawl, bulk-download or systematically extract content from the Service, or use it to build a competing dataset or index;
• use automated means to place load on the Service, or attempt to circumvent rate limits, usage allowances or authentication;
• reverse engineer, decompile or attempt to derive our prompts, models or source code, except to the extent that law makes such a restriction unenforceable;
• resell, sublicense or provide the Service to third parties as your own;
• upload or enter unlawful content, or personal data about other people — including patient or participant data — into any free-text field;
• use the Service to infringe intellectual property rights, including by using it to obtain or distribute paywalled full text you are not entitled to;
• interfere with the Service's security, or with anyone else's use of it.

We may suspend or terminate an account that breaches this section, and where the breach is non-serious we will normally contact you first.

7. Content and ownership

Yours

Your research interests, your notes, your reading list and anything else you write remain yours. You grant us a worldwide, non-exclusive, royalty-free licence to host, process and transmit that content to the extent needed to operate the Service for you — including sending it to the AI providers listed in the privacy policy. That licence ends when you delete the content or your account, apart from the retention described in that policy.

We do not use your content to train our own models, and we do not authorise our providers to use it to train theirs.

Ours

The Service, its software, design, brand and the wording of these documents belong to Oslr Ltd. Subject to these terms, we grant you a personal, non-transferable, non-exclusive, revocable licence to use the Service. Nothing here transfers ownership of anything to you.

Output

You may use the summaries, briefings and reasons generated for you within your own research and practice, including sharing an individual paper and its reason with a colleague. Please don't republish the generated output at scale or present it as a product of your own — and do not cite a Paper Scout summary in place of the paper it describes.

Feedback

If you send us suggestions, we may use them without obligation or payment to you. We appreciate them; we just can't run an accounting process around them.

8. Pricing, subscriptions and billing

Paper Scout is sold as an auto-renewing monthly subscription, in two plans:

• Reader — £4.99 per month, including a one-month free introductory period for subscribers who have not had one before. Eligibility for that free month is determined by Apple, once per Apple Account.
• Unlimited — £9.99 per month, with no introductory period.

Prices are in pounds sterling and are the price shown in the App Store at the time you subscribe, which is the price that governs. Both plans include the ranked feed, the explanation attached to each paper, the miss diagnosis and the weekly briefing, none of which are metered.

The metered part is audio. Generating a spoken summary of a paper draws on a weekly allowance: 10 summaries on Reader and 20 on Unlimited, measured over a rolling seven-day period rather than a calendar week, so each summary becomes available again seven days after it was used. Replaying a summary that has already been generated does not count, and a summary that fails to generate is not counted. The Unlimited allowance is a fair-use limit and we may contact you before restricting an account that materially exceeds it.

Subscriptions are sold through the Apple App Store, and Apple — not Oslr — takes payment. They renew automatically each month unless cancelled at least 24 hours before the end of the current period, and they are managed and cancelled in your Apple Account settings. Any unused part of a free introductory period is forfeited if you subscribe to a paid plan during it. Refunds are governed by Apple's policy; we can ask on your behalf, but we cannot issue them. Deleting your Paper Scout account does not cancel a store subscription.

If your subscription lapses or you choose not to subscribe, your account becomes read-only rather than being deleted: papers already in your feed, your reading list and any audio already generated remain available, while new runs, new audio summaries and new briefings stop. Nothing you have saved is deleted or withheld because you stopped paying.

We may change these prices or what a plan includes. Where we do, the change will be published here and shown in the app. Price changes to an existing subscription are handled by Apple under its own rules: Apple notifies you before an increase takes effect and, depending on its size, may require you to agree to it before renewing. In every case you can cancel before the next renewal rather than accept a new price.

If you are a consumer in the UK or EU you may have a statutory right to cancel a purchase within 14 days. Because digital services begin immediately, that right may be lost once you start using a paid feature; nothing in these terms affects your non-excludable statutory rights.

9. Availability

We aim to keep Paper Scout running, but it is provided on an "as available" basis and we do not promise any particular level of uptime. Searches depend on services we do not control — PubMed and our AI providers among them — and those can be slow, rate-limited or unavailable. When that happens the Service is designed to report an honest error rather than return a degraded or fabricated result.

We may suspend the Service for maintenance, and we will give notice where it is practical to do so.

10. Warranties and liability

To the fullest extent permitted by law, the Service is provided "as is" and "as available", and we exclude all implied warranties, including fitness for a particular purpose, satisfactory quality and non-infringement. We do not warrant that the Service will be uninterrupted or error-free, or that it will find every relevant paper.

To the fullest extent permitted by law, Oslr Ltd will not be liable for indirect or consequential loss, loss of profit, revenue, data, goodwill or anticipated savings, or for any loss arising from your reliance on AI-generated output or on the completeness of a search.

Where liability cannot lawfully be excluded, our total aggregate liability arising out of or in connection with these terms is limited to the greater of (a) the amount you paid us for the Service in the 12 months before the claim arose, and (b) £100.

Nothing in these terms limits or excludes liability for death or personal injury caused by negligence, for fraud or fraudulent misrepresentation, or for anything else that cannot lawfully be limited. If you are a consumer, your statutory rights are unaffected.

11. Indemnity

If you use the Service in breach of these terms and that causes a third-party claim against us, you agree to indemnify us against the reasonable losses, damages and costs arising from it. This does not apply to consumers using the Service for personal purposes.

12. Suspension and termination

You may stop using Paper Scout and delete your account at any time. We may suspend or terminate your access if you materially breach these terms, if we are required to by law, or if we discontinue the Service — in which case we will give you as much notice as we reasonably can and a means of retrieving your saved papers.

Sections 5, 7, 10, 11, 14 and 15 survive termination.

13. Apple App Store terms

These provisions apply if you obtained Paper Scout from the Apple App Store:

• This agreement is between you and Oslr Ltd only, not with Apple. Apple is not responsible for the app or its content.
• Your licence to use the app is limited to use on Apple-branded devices you own or control, as permitted by the App Store Terms of Service.
• Apple has no obligation to provide maintenance or support for the app. Support requests should go to support@paperscout.net.
• If the app fails to conform to any applicable warranty, you may notify Apple and Apple may refund the purchase price; to the maximum extent permitted by law, Apple has no other warranty obligation.
• Oslr Ltd, not Apple, is responsible for any claims relating to the app, including product liability, failure to conform to legal requirements, and consumer protection claims.
• Oslr Ltd, not Apple, is responsible for the investigation and defence of any third-party claim that the app infringes intellectual property rights.
• You confirm you are not located in a country subject to a U.S. Government embargo or designated as terrorist-supporting, and that you are not on any U.S. Government restricted-party list.
• Apple and its subsidiaries are third-party beneficiaries of these terms and may enforce them against you.

14. General

Changes. We may update these terms. The date at the top will change, and where a change materially affects your rights we will tell you in the app or by email before it takes effect. Continuing to use the Service after that means you accept the new terms.

Assignment. You may not assign these terms. We may assign them to a successor in connection with a merger, acquisition or sale of assets.

Entire agreement and severability. These terms and the privacy policy are the whole agreement between us about the Service. If any provision is found unenforceable, the rest continues in force.

No waiver. If we do not enforce a right, that is not a waiver of it.

Third parties. Apart from Apple as described in section 13, no one other than you and Oslr Ltd has rights under these terms.

15. Governing law

These terms are governed by the laws of England and Wales, and the courts of England and Wales have exclusive jurisdiction. If you are a consumer resident elsewhere in the UK or in the EEA, you keep the benefit of any mandatory protections of your local law and may bring proceedings in your local courts.

16. Contact

Oslr Ltd, United Kingdom — full registered address on request.
General and support: support@paperscout.net
Privacy: privacy@paperscout.net
Security: security@paperscout.net