Terms of Service

Effective 13 November 2026

These terms are an agreement between you and SmileMaxer LLC, a Maryland limited liability company (“SmileMaxer”, “we”, “us”), for your use of ResearchMaxer at researchmaxer.com (the “Service”). By creating an account or using the Service you accept them. Please read section 16: it sets out how disputes are resolved, including arbitration for people in the United States.

1. What ResearchMaxer is

ResearchMaxer helps authors check their citations. You add a manuscript and the sources it cites; the Service finds the passage in each source that relates to each cited sentence, highlights it, and gives a verdict and a support rating for you and your co-authors to review. It also formats reference lists and helps prepare figures. ResearchMaxer finds and flags: it does not edit your manuscript, and nothing counts as checked until a person marks it.

2. Accounts

• You must be at least 16 years old, and old enough to make a binding contract where you live to buy a paid plan.
• An account belongs to one person. You sign in with a one-time code sent to your email address, so keep that mailbox secure; you are responsible for what is done from your account.
• Give us an email address you control, and do not create accounts to get around plan limits or the one-time free start.

3. Plans and billing

Plans. Plans, their limits and current prices are on the pricing page. Prices are in US dollars and exclude tax, which is added where it applies.

Free start. Each person gets the free start once, whatever email address they use. It includes a set number of source papers in total and one paper.

Subscriptions. Paid plans are billed in advance, monthly or yearly, through our payment processor, Stripe. By subscribing you authorise us to charge your payment method at the start of each period until you cancel. Your subscription renews automatically.

How allowances are counted. A source paper counts against your allowance when you add its file, however many sentences cite it, and removing it does not give it back. Monthly allowances reset at the start of each calendar month and do not carry over. Each person who reviews a paper needs a plan of their own: an invitation gives access to a paper, not a free plan.

Price changes. We may change prices with at least 30 days’ notice by email or in the Service. A change applies from your next billing period; if you do not agree, cancel before then.

Failed payments. If a payment fails, Stripe retries it for a while and your plan stays meanwhile. If it still fails, the subscription ends and your account returns to the free start, with your papers still there.

4. Cancelling, deleting and refunds

You can cancel at any time under Plan and billing, then “Manage billing”. Cancelling takes effect at the end of the period you have paid for: you keep your plan until then and are not charged again.

You can also delete your account under Plan and billing. Unlike cancelling, deleting takes effect at once: any paid plan is cancelled immediately and your papers and files are deleted as the Privacy Policy describes. The rest of the current period is not refunded.

Except where the law requires otherwise, payments are non-refundable, and we do not give refunds or credits for part periods, unused allowance, or time you did not use the Service. If something went wrong on our side, email us: we will look at it fairly. Nothing here limits refund or withdrawal rights you have by law (see section 15).

5. Your content

Your manuscripts, sources, figures, references, notes and marks (“your content”) remain yours. You give SmileMaxer a worldwide, non-exclusive, royalty-free licence to store, process, copy and display your content, and to send it to the providers named in the Privacy Policy, only as needed to provide the Service to you and the people you invite, and to keep it secure. We do not use your content to train AI models, and we do not publish or sell it.

You are responsible for your content and must have the right to add it. Many sources are copyrighted: add only copies you are entitled to use for your own research. Files you add are private to the paper and are not shared beyond the people on it. If you believe something in the Service infringes your rights, email us with the details and we will act on it promptly.

Keep your own copies of your work. The Service is not a backup, and deleted content cannot be recovered.

6. AI findings and your judgement

The Service uses AI to find passages and to judge how well a source supports a sentence. Every highlighted quote is checked word for word against the text of the source before it is shown, but the AI’s reading of a source can still be wrong or incomplete: it can miss a passage, misjudge a statistic, or rate a citation too high or too low. The support rating is the AI’s estimate, not a measured probability.

You remain responsible for your manuscript and for every citation in it. Use ResearchMaxer to see where to look; read the source yourself before you rely on a finding, especially before you submit or publish. ResearchMaxer is not a plagiarism checker, a statistical review, peer review, or legal, medical or other professional advice, and passing its checks does not mean a journal will accept your work.

7. Co-authors

The person who creates a paper owns it and decides who is invited. Everyone invited can see the whole paper, including its manuscript text, sources and everyone’s notes, so invite only people you trust with it. The owner can remove people, delete files and delete the paper. Files someone adds to your paper stay with the paper if they later leave or close their account.

8. Acceptable use

You agree not to:

• use the Service to break any law, or to infringe anyone’s copyright, privacy or other rights;
• add content that contains malware, or that you have no right to share with the people on a paper;
• get around plan limits, spending limits or rate limits, for example with several accounts, or try to get a second free start;
• probe, scan or test the security of the Service, or reach accounts or papers you have not been invited to (report security problems to us instead);
• use bots, scrapers or other automated access, except the Service’s own pages and any connections we provide;
• resell or share access to the Service, or use it to build a competing product;
• overload or interfere with the Service, or reverse engineer it except where the law allows despite this term; or
• use invitations to send unwanted messages.

We may investigate breaches and suspend or close accounts that break these rules.

9. Our service and open-source parts

The Service, its software, design and text, and the names ResearchMaxer and SmileMaxer, belong to SmileMaxer LLC or its licensors. These terms give you the right to use the Service, nothing more. If you send us feedback, we may use it freely.

The Service includes open-source work under its own licences, among them: citation styles and locales from the Citation Style Language project (CC BY-SA 3.0), citeproc-js (CPAL 1.0), PDF.js (Apache 2.0), JSZip (MIT), UTIF.js (MIT) and the Nunito typeface (SIL Open Font License). Journal name abbreviations come from the US National Library of Medicine.

10. Availability and changes

We work to keep the Service available, but we do not promise it will be uninterrupted or free of errors, and we offer no service-level agreement. Checking may pause for a while when AI capacity or the site’s spending limit is reached; your files stay safe and you can try again later. When something fails on our side, the Service records an error report and we aim to fix it quickly. We may change, add or remove features. If we stop offering paid plans altogether, we will refund the unused part of any prepaid period, which is the exception to section 4.

11. Suspension and termination

You can stop using the Service and delete your account at any time. We may suspend or close your account at once if you seriously break these terms, if your use creates a risk or legal exposure for us or others, or if the law requires it, and otherwise on 30 days’ notice. When an account is closed, its content is deleted as described in the Privacy Policy. Sections 4, 5, 6 and 9 to 18 continue to apply after termination.

12. Disclaimers

The Service is provided “as is” and “as available”. To the fullest extent the law allows, we disclaim all warranties, express or implied, including merchantability, fitness for a particular purpose, title and non-infringement, and any warranty that findings, verdicts, ratings or quotes are complete, accurate or suitable for any purpose.

13. Limitation of liability

To the fullest extent the law allows: (a) neither SmileMaxer nor its suppliers will be liable for any indirect, incidental, special, consequential or punitive damages, or for lost profits, revenue, data, grants, publications or goodwill, including from relying on a finding; and (b) our total liability for all claims relating to the Service is limited to the greater of the amounts you paid us in the 12 months before the claim arose or US $100.

These limits apply to any theory of liability, but not to liability that cannot be limited by law, such as liability for gross negligence, wilful misconduct, or, where exclusions are not allowed, death or personal injury caused by negligence.

14. Indemnification

If you use the Service for a business or institution, you will defend and indemnify SmileMaxer against third-party claims arising from your content, your breach of these terms, or your use of the Service against the law, except to the extent caused by our own breach. This section does not apply to consumers where the law does not allow it.

15. Consumer rights

If you use the Service as a consumer in a country whose laws give you rights that cannot be waived by contract (for example in the European Union, the United Kingdom or Australia), nothing in these terms limits those rights, and where these terms conflict with them, your rights prevail. Consumers there may also bring disputes in their local courts under their local law where that law provides, despite sections 16 and 17.

16. Disputes and arbitration (United States)

Talk to us first. Before bringing a claim, email support@researchmaxer.com describing the dispute. We will try to resolve it within 60 days.

Arbitration. If it is not resolved, any dispute arising out of these terms or the Service will be settled by binding arbitration administered by the American Arbitration Association under its applicable rules, rather than in court, except that either side may bring an individual claim in small-claims court, or seek an injunction in court for misuse of intellectual property. The Federal Arbitration Act governs this section. The arbitration will have one arbitrator, be conducted in English, and may take place by video or, if in person, in Maryland or another place both sides agree.

No class actions. Disputes will be resolved only individually. Neither side may take part in a class, consolidated or representative action. If this waiver is found unenforceable for a claim, that claim proceeds in court, not arbitration.

Opting out. You can opt out of this arbitration agreement by emailing support@researchmaxer.com within 30 days of first accepting these terms, with your name, your account email and a statement that you opt out of arbitration.

17. Governing law

These terms are governed by the laws of the State of Maryland, USA, without regard to its conflict-of-law rules. Subject to sections 15 and 16, disputes will be brought only in the state or federal courts located in Maryland, and both sides consent to their jurisdiction. The United Nations Convention on Contracts for the International Sale of Goods does not apply. You may not use the Service in breach of US export control or sanctions laws.

18. Changes and general terms

We may update these terms. For material changes we will give at least 30 days’ notice by email or in the Service before they take effect; the date at the top always shows the current version. If you do not agree, stop using the Service and cancel before the change takes effect. These terms are written in English; if a translation differs, the English version controls as far as the law of your country allows.

These terms, the Privacy Policy and anything you agree to at checkout are the whole agreement between you and SmileMaxer about the Service. If a part is found unenforceable, the rest stays in effect. Not enforcing a term is not a waiver of it. You may not transfer these terms without our consent; we may transfer them as part of a merger, acquisition or sale of assets. Neither side is responsible for delays caused by events beyond its reasonable control. Notices to us go to support@researchmaxer.com; notices to you go to your account email or are shown in the Service.

19. Contact

SmileMaxer LLC, Maryland, USA. support@researchmaxer.com