This text forms the legal foundation for your independent digital academic commons.
It is structured to protect your platform from liability on shared hosting, enforce academic integrity, and guarantee total intellectual autonomy to your scholars using Creative Commons framing.
Terms of Service & Intellectual Property Agreement
Effective Date: June 12, 2026
Platform: Hed=Core Academic Commons
By registering an account, submitting research, or participating in the collaboration spaces on this platform, you agree to comply with and be bound by the following terms and conditions.
1. Intellectual Property & Scholar Autonomy
1.1 Non-Exclusive License & Ownership
Retention of Rights: Authors and creators retaining full copyright ownership of all papers, datasets, preprints, policy briefs, and educational resources uploaded to this platform. The platform claims no ownership over your intellectual property.
Grant of Distribution License: By uploading content to our open-access repository, you grant this platform a perpetual, non-exclusive, worldwide, royalty-free license to host, index, display, and distribute your work for public educational access.
1.2 Open Access Framework (Creative Commons)
Mandatory Licensing: All materials deposited into our public Open Access Repository must be distributed under a Creative Commons License chosen by the author during submission (the default recommendation is CC BY-NC-SA 4.0 – Attribution-NonCommercial-ShareAlike).
Prior Agreements: It is the sole responsibility of the author to ensure that preprints or working papers submitted to this platform do not violate existing copyright agreements with external legacy publishers.
2. Scholarly Conduct & Platform Integrity
2.1 Academic Honesty
Users agree that all submitted research, data, and commentary are original works or are properly cited under standard global academic attribution protocols.
Plagiarism, falsification of data, unauthorized co-author inclusion, or the use of undisclosed, un-vetted generative AI for data simulation will result in immediate account termination and a permanent platform ban.
2.2 Community Engagement Standards
Collaboration groups, forums, and peer-review suites must remain professional, evidence-based spaces.
Personal attacks, targeted harassment, commercial advertising (spamming), and the promotion of non-peer-reviewed fringe science are strictly prohibited.
3. Server Architecture, Data Limits, & System Abuse
3.1 External Infrastructure Routing
To preserve network performance, users are strictly forbidden from uploading large datasets, multimedia files, high-resolution videos, or massive text files directly to the local WordPress media library.
All authorized files must be submitted via our cloud-optimized submission portals, which offload storage onto decoupled external cloud architecture.
3.2 Automated Scraping & Database Abuse
While our repository metadata is open for harvesting via standard academic endpoints (OAI-PMH), unauthorized automated scraping, brute-force API calls, or bot traffic targeting our collaborative forum structures is strictly forbidden.
Violations will trigger a permanent IP and network-level block via our security firewalls to prevent server degradation.
4. Limitation of Liability & Termination
4.1 “As-Is” Service Provision
This platform is provided as an independent, community-governed research collective on a shared server infrastructure.
We offer no guarantees regarding uninterrupted uptime, data permanence, or hosting server performance. Users are strongly advised to keep independent, local backups of all research.
4.2 Account Review & Deletion
The platform administrators and review secretariat reserve the right to suspend or delete accounts that fail to pass verification, remain inactive or unverified for over 72 hours, or violate any section of these terms.