Terms of Service

These terms are an agreement between you and Rivul, which operates the service at rivul.ai. Creating an account or using the service means you accept them. If you do not accept them, do not use Rivul.

The Privacy Policy, the AI-Use Disclosure, the Refund and Cancellation Policy and the Copyright and Takedown page form part of these terms. Questions and notices go to support@rivul.ai.

Rivul is a web application for writing research papers. It provides an editor, a private library of PDFs you upload or fetch, a reader with highlight-to-cite, AI assistance for drafting and revising prose, retrieval and formatting of citation metadata from public scholarly databases, a set of review checks over your own draft, and export to LaTeX, Word and camera-ready archives.

Rivul is not a publisher, not a co-author, not a plagiarism checker, and not a substitute for reading the papers you cite. It does not verify that a source supports the claim you attached it to; the checks it runs are described in the product and in the AI-Use Disclosure in terms of what they actually measure.

Features and availability change as the product develops. We may add, alter or withdraw a feature. Where a change removes something you depend on we will try to give notice, and export is always available so that your work is never trapped by a change you did not want.

You must be at least sixteen, or older where your jurisdiction requires it, and legally able to enter this agreement. If you are using Rivul in the course of employment or study, you are confirming that you have whatever permission your institution requires.

Give accurate registration details and keep your password confidential. You are responsible for everything done under your account, including by anyone you let use it. One person, one account: an account is not a shared departmental login, and sharing credentials is how one compromised password becomes everyone's problem.

Tell us at support@rivul.ai if you think someone else has access to your account. Changing your password immediately invalidates every existing session, which is the fastest thing you can do yourself.

Do not upload content you have no right to use. Rivul's core loop is researchers uploading published articles, and the rights in most of those belong to a publisher or an author rather than to you. Your institutional subscription generally lets you keep a copy for your own scholarly use; it does not let you upload a publisher's file on someone else's behalf, and it never covers a file you obtained from a source that had no right to give it to you. Prefer the open-access version when one exists. The Copyright and Takedown page explains how a rights holder gets a file removed and what happens to an account that accumulates notices.

Do not use Rivul to produce work that breaches an integrity policy that applies to you. Institutions, funders, journals and conferences each set their own rules on AI assistance, authorship and disclosure, those rules differ and they change, and complying with the ones that bind you is your responsibility rather than ours. The AI-Use Disclosure contains a statement you are free to adapt for a submission, but your venue's policy takes precedence over anything on this site.

Do not attempt to breach security, access another account, probe or circumvent rate limits and usage allowances, scrape the service, resell or sublicense access, use automated means to generate volume you would not generate by hand, or use Rivul to produce unlawful, defamatory or harassing material, or material designed to deceive about the provenance of research.

Do not use Rivul to fabricate research. This is stated separately from the rest because it is the one misuse that damages the people who rely on the literature rather than only us: generating a results section for an experiment that was never run, or citations chosen to look authoritative rather than because they were read, is outside what this service is for.

You own your content. The documents you write, the briefs, the references you assemble, your annotations and the files you upload remain yours, and nothing in these terms transfers any ownership to us. Rivul claims no authorship of, and no rights in, the papers you write with it.

You keep the copyright in AI-assisted text as between you and us. Whether machine-assisted output is copyrightable at all, and how a journal expects it to be disclosed, are questions of law and of editorial policy rather than of this contract, and both are moving. We make no representation about either.

To run the service we need a narrow licence, and it is narrow deliberately. You grant Rivul a non-exclusive, worldwide, royalty-free licence to host, store, copy, transmit, index, excerpt and display your content, and to send the parts of it that a request requires to the AI provider and to the storage and infrastructure providers named in the Privacy Policy, for the sole purpose of operating the service for you. The licence lasts as long as you keep the content in Rivul and ends when you delete it or close your account, save for copies in backups until those age out.

That licence does not permit us to train a model on your content, to publish it, to share it with another user, to sell it, or to use it to develop anything other than the service as it operates for you. We do not do those things and this licence does not allow us to start.

This is the most important section on the page and the one with the most at stake for you, so it is written at length rather than compressed into a disclaimer.

AI output can be wrong. It can state something false with complete fluency, omit the qualification that made a finding defensible, mischaracterise a method, misattribute a result to the wrong study, or invert a direction of effect. This is a property of the technology and not a defect we expect to eliminate. Rivul reduces the specific risk of invented references by taking citation metadata from Crossref, DataCite, Semantic Scholar and arXiv records and formatting it by fixed rules rather than letting a model write the bibliography, and the review checks in the product report what they actually measured. None of that makes the prose correct.

You are the author. Every sentence you keep is yours, whether you typed it or accepted it. Before you submit anything for publication, or rely on it in a grant application, a thesis, a report or a clinical or engineering decision, you must read every AI-assisted passage, verify every claim against the underlying evidence, and open every citation and confirm that the source exists, says what you have said it says, and supports the specific claim you attached it to. Term overlap between your sentence and a cited passage is not support, and Rivul says so where it reports overlap.

Rivul is a drafting aid and not a source of truth, and it gives no warranty that any output is accurate, complete, current, original, non-infringing or fit for your purpose. To the fullest extent the law permits, we are not liable for the consequences of unverified output being published: that includes a correction, an erratum, a retraction, a rejected submission, a withdrawn or repaid grant, a finding of misconduct, a lost claim of priority, a disciplinary or professional consequence, or damage to your reputation or your co-authors'. Those consequences follow from a manuscript being submitted, and the decision to submit is yours alone.

If you are subject to an integrity policy that restricts or requires disclosure of AI assistance, follow it. If your co-authors have not agreed to the use of an AI tool on a shared manuscript, ask them before you use one. If you would not be comfortable telling a reviewer how a passage was produced, that is the signal to rewrite it.

Rivul depends on services operated by other companies, and the Privacy Policy names them and what each receives. The AI provider, the scholarly metadata databases, the hosting, storage, database, email, cache and payment providers are independent third parties governed by their own terms.

We are not responsible for their availability, their output, their pricing or their practices, and an outage or a change at one of them may degrade or interrupt Rivul. Where a provider's own terms constrain what you may do, those constraints reach you through this agreement: in particular, do not use AI output in a way the AI provider's policies prohibit.

Public research infrastructure such as Crossref, OpenAlex and arXiv is a shared resource maintained largely by non-profits. Rivul identifies itself and caches results to be a good citizen of it, and abusing it through Rivul is a breach of these terms.

New accounts get a 1-day trial of the research product: upload, scholarly search, fetching open-access PDFs, Zotero, citation refresh, re-extract/OCR, and research chat. After the trial — and after a paid subscription ends — your work is not hostage. The editor, your existing documents, reading and deleting your own library PDFs, editing citations, and exporting your own manuscript stay available. New uploads, BibTeX or Zotero import, fetching new PDFs, scholarly search, OpenAlex refresh, re-extract, and research chat are Pro and Ultimate. The current allowances are published on the pricing page, which is generated from the same constants the service enforces, so it cannot disagree with what you actually get.

Pro costs $19 per month, or $144 for a year paid once. Prices are in United States dollars and exclude any tax that applies to you. Stripe is the payment processor and is not the merchant of record, so Rivul is the seller and is responsible for charging and remitting any applicable sales tax or VAT. Where tax applies it is added to the published price at checkout.

Billing is not switched on yet. Nothing on the site currently takes a card, no account converts to a paid plan on its own, and the published price exists so that it is not a surprise on the day it opens. Everything in this section governs a Pro subscription once billing opens.

Subscriptions renew automatically. A monthly plan renews every month and an annual plan every year, on the same date, charged to the payment method on file, until you cancel. You can cancel at any time, from billing settings, and cancellation takes effect at the end of the period you have already paid for. Before an annual subscription renews we send an advance notice by email stating the renewal date, the amount and how to cancel; monthly subscribers get a shorter notice for the same reason.

Upgrading, downgrading, switching between monthly and annual, updating your card and downloading past invoices all happen on the same billing page, through Stripe's customer portal. Cancelling is as easy as subscribing was, on the same surface, with no retention maze and no requirement to contact support.

The Refund and Cancellation Policy sets out what happens to money. We may change prices, and where a change affects your existing subscription it takes effect at your next renewal and never mid-period, with notice by email beforehand. If we raise the price of a plan you are on, you can cancel before the renewal and pay nothing further.

AI features are metered and reading, writing, citing, organising and exporting are not. When you exhaust an AI allowance the AI features pause and everything else keeps working; the allowance returns on the schedule the pricing page describes.

There is also an overall spend ceiling that protects the service from a single runaway account, and a per-minute rate limit that protects it from automated traffic. Deliberately circumventing either, including by opening additional accounts to multiply an allowance, is a breach of these terms.

You can stop using Rivul at any time. You can cancel a subscription from billing settings, and you can delete your account from settings, yourself, without asking us. Deletion is immediate and permanent, so export your work first. Deleting the account also cancels any paid subscription immediately, so no further charges are made; cancelling from billing settings instead leaves the account in place and keeps Pro until the period you have already paid for ends.

We may suspend or terminate an account that breaches these terms, that is being used unlawfully, that repeatedly attracts unrebutted copyright notices, or whose activity threatens the security or availability of the service for others. Where circumstances allow it we will warn you first and give you a chance to put it right, and we will describe what the problem is rather than closing an account in silence. Where the breach is serious or ongoing, suspension may be immediate.

If we terminate your account other than for a breach by you, we will give you at least thirty days' notice, an opportunity to export everything, and a pro-rata refund of any unused prepaid period. On termination your licence to use Rivul ends and your content is deleted as described in the Privacy Policy.

We may discontinue Rivul entirely. If that happens we will give account holders at least sixty days' notice, keep export working for the whole of that period, and refund the unused portion of any prepaid subscription.

Rivul is provided as it is and as it is available. To the fullest extent the law permits, we disclaim all warranties, express or implied, including any implied warranty of merchantability, fitness for a particular purpose, non-infringement, accuracy, and uninterrupted or error-free operation.

We do not warrant that the service will be available without interruption, that defects will be corrected, that it will be free of harmful code, that AI output will be accurate or original, that citation metadata retrieved from a third-party database will be correct, or that a retraction or preprint flag will catch every case. The retraction sweep depends on external registers being reachable and complete, and it is a help rather than a guarantee.

Nothing here excludes a liability that cannot lawfully be excluded. If you are a consumer, you have statutory rights that these terms do not affect, and where local consumer law gives you a stronger position than this section, that law wins.

To the fullest extent the law permits, neither party is liable to the other for indirect, incidental, special, consequential, exemplary or punitive damages, or for lost profits, lost revenue, lost data, lost publication or funding opportunities, or reputational harm, however caused and on any theory of liability, even if advised of the possibility.

To the fullest extent the law permits, our total liability for claims arising from these terms or the service is capped at the greater of the fees you paid in the twelve months before the claim, or one hundred United States dollars.

These limits do not apply to liability for death or personal injury caused by negligence, for fraud or fraudulent misrepresentation, or to any other liability that applicable law does not permit to be limited. They apply to the maximum extent permitted where a jurisdiction restricts them in part.

You accept that the allocation of risk in this section and in the AI output section is the basis on which Rivul is offered at its price, and that verifying output before publication is the protection you have rather than a recovery from us afterwards.

You agree to indemnify and hold Rivul harmless against claims, losses and reasonable legal costs arising from content you uploaded that you had no right to upload, from your breach of these terms or of a law, and from your publication or other use of material produced with Rivul.

We will tell you promptly about any claim to which this applies, let you control the defence of it if you wish, and not settle it in a way that imposes an obligation on you without your consent.

We may update these terms. The current version is always on this page with its last-updated date at the top.

For a change that materially reduces your rights, increases your obligations, or widens what we may do with your content, we will email account holders at least thirty days before it takes effect, and a subscriber who does not accept the change may cancel before the effective date and receive a pro-rata refund of the unused prepaid period. For a clarification, a correction, or a change required by law, the updated date is the notice.

Continuing to use Rivul after a change takes effect means you accept it. If you do not accept it, stop using the service and, if you wish, delete your account.

Nothing in this section removes a right you have to bring proceedings in your own country of residence where consumer law gives you that right, or to complain to a regulator.

Before formal proceedings, we ask that you write to support@rivul.ai and describe the problem, and we will respond within thirty days. Most disputes with a small operation are misunderstandings, and this is the cheapest step for both of us.

If a provision of these terms is unenforceable, it is limited or severed to the minimum extent necessary and the rest continues to apply. A failure to enforce a provision is not a waiver of it.

You may not assign this agreement without our consent. We may assign it as part of a merger, acquisition or sale of assets, on notice to you, and your subscription terms and this policy travel with it unless you are told otherwise and given the chance to cancel.

These terms, together with the Privacy Policy, the AI-Use Disclosure, the Refund and Cancellation Policy and the Copyright and Takedown page, are the entire agreement between us about Rivul, and replace any earlier version of them.

Notices to you go to the email address on your account. Notices to us go to support@rivul.ai.