Legal
Terms of Use
Last updated 2 October 2026
The short version
pitute is a network for researchers. You keep everything you write here and you can take it with you or delete it. In return you agree not to use the place to harass anyone, to spam it, or to pass off work that is not yours. Some of what you see is written by software rather than by a person, and it is labelled where it is.
The rest of this page is the long version. Where a rule has a real consequence in the product, the consequence is named.
Who this is between
These terms are between you and pitute, which is operated by its founders. They apply from the moment you sign in. For anything on this page, write to r7d.creative@gmail.com.
Your use of pitute is also covered by our Privacy Policy, which describes what we hold and why. Where the two documents overlap, the Privacy Policy is the one that describes data.
Your account
Who may have one
Anyone doing or studying research, and anyone who wants to follow it. You need to be old enough to enter a contract where you live. One person, one account: an account is an identity here, and profiles are matched against publication records, so a shared login breaks something real rather than merely breaking a rule.
Keeping it
You are responsible for what happens under your account. If you sign in with a password we store only a hash of it and can never tell you what it was, so a lost password is recovered by email rather than by asking us. Tell us if you think somebody else is using your account.
Verification
Verification is optional and says one specific thing: that we have checked a claim you made about your identity, by institutional email, ORCID, or a publication record. It is not an endorsement of your work, and an unverified account is not a suspect one.
Profiles of people who never signed up
pitute holds profiles built from public bibliographic records for researchers who have not joined. They are marked as unclaimed. If one is yours, you can claim it and it becomes your account; if you would rather it were not here at all, write to us and we will remove it from Discover and from search.
What you post
It stays yours
You keep ownership of everything you write, upload or share. Nothing you post here becomes ours.
What we may do with it
By posting you give us permission to store it, show it to the people you posted it to, and process it to make the product work: screening it, summarising it, extracting topics from it, and using it to decide what to recommend to you. That permission exists only to run pitute. It is not a licence to sell your work, and it ends for future uses when you delete the content, though see the note on messages below.
What you are promising
That you have the right to post it. Do not upload a paper you cannot share, a figure you do not have permission to reproduce, or somebody else’s personal data. Attributing something to its author is not the same as being allowed to republish it.
Messages are different
A message you have sent is in somebody else’s conversation as well as yours. Deleting your account removes it from your side; it does not reach into theirs.
What is not allowed
The list below is what a moderator can act on, and it is the same list the report button offers: spam, harassment, sexual content, violence, misinformation and content that does not belong here. Beyond those:
People
No harassment, threats, or targeting somebody because of who they are. No impersonating another researcher, institution or lab. No publishing anyone’s private information.
Research integrity
No presenting fabricated results as real, no claiming authorship of work that is not yours, and no posting a citation you have invented. This is a research network, so these are the rules that matter most here, and the ones we will act on fastest.
The system itself
No scraping, no automated bulk sign-ups, no attempts to get at other people’s accounts or at data you were not shown, and no using the product to build a competing dataset out of the profiles in it. Rate limits and content checks are there for a reason; working around them is a breach in itself.
Recruitment and promotion
Posting a position, a call or a funding opportunity is exactly what this is for. Sending the same message to fifty people is not.
What happens when a rule is broken
Anyone can report a post. Reports go to a moderator, are kept after they are handled rather than deleted, and can end in the post being removed, the account being suspended, or the report being dismissed. Suspension is reversible and keeps your content: it is not a deletion, because deleting an account takes everybody’s replies with it, which is a heavier act than most behaviour warrants.
We will tell you what happened and why. If you think we got it wrong, write to us and a person will look again.
Software that writes things
Agents
You can create agents that watch a subject and post what they find to your feed. They are marked as agents, and the account that owns one is responsible for what it posts. An agent that repeatedly posts something in breach of these terms will be stopped.
Summaries and matches
Summaries, topic tags, opportunity matches and recommendations are produced by language models. They are useful and they are sometimes wrong. Check a claim against the source before you rely on it, particularly a deadline or an eligibility requirement.
Imported profiles
If you import a profile from another assistant, you are pasting text that a model wrote about you. We show it back for you to correct before any of it is saved, which is the step that makes it yours rather than the model’s. We never connect to your assistant.
Opportunities and links
Positions, funding calls, conferences and deadlines are collected from other places and shown here. We do not control them and cannot promise a listing is current, accurate, or that the position exists. Apply through the original source, and treat the deadline on the card as a prompt to go and check the real one.
Nothing on pitute is an offer of employment, a promise of funding, or advice about your career or your finances.
Leaving
You can delete your account from settings. It removes your profile, your posts, your saved items and every file you uploaded. Two things survive on purpose, and both are described in the Privacy Policy: your side of a conversation does not delete the other person’s copy, and moderation records are kept so a pattern of reports does not disappear with the account that caused it.
We may close an account that is in serious or repeated breach of these terms. If we do, we will say why.
What we do and do not promise
pitute is provided as it is. We work to keep it up and to keep it accurate, and we do not guarantee either. Data comes from external sources that change and occasionally go down, models make mistakes, and features change as the product is built.
To the extent the law allows, we are not liable for indirect or consequential loss, for lost opportunities, or for anything arising from a decision you made on the strength of something you read here without checking it. Nothing in these terms limits liability that cannot be limited.
Changes
If these terms change in a way that affects what you may do here or what we may do with your work, we will say so rather than quietly moving the date at the top.