Terms of Service

Unisphere is operated by EldoNova+ Technologies (“we”, “us”). These terms are an agreement between you and us. By creating an account or using Unisphere you accept them. If you use Unisphere for an organisation, such as a society that runs a journal, you confirm you may accept them on its behalf.

The Privacy Policy explains how we handle personal information and forms part of these terms.

Unisphere is a platform for scholarly publishing. It lets:

• editors run journals, from submission and peer review through to publication;
• authors submit manuscripts, revise them and follow their progress;
• reviewers assess manuscripts they are invited to review;
• anyone with an account publish datasets, software and preprints in the repository;
• anyone read published articles and repository records.

Each journal is run by its own editors, who set its scope, policies and fees and make every editorial decision. We provide the tools; we do not decide what a journal publishes.

• Give accurate information, including your name and affiliation, and keep it current.
• An account is for one person. Keep your password secret and tell us at privacy@unisphere.com if you think someone else has used your account.
• Only add an ORCID iD that is yours. Journal staff and readers rely on author identity.
• You must be at least 16 years old to create an account.

When you submit a manuscript you confirm that:

• the work is original, and you have the rights to everything in it;
• every listed author has agreed to the submission and to being named;
• it is not under consideration elsewhere unless the journal's policy allows that;
• you have disclosed funding and competing interests accurately;
• research involving people, animals or personal data had the approvals and consents it required.

Review is single-blind: reviewers see the authors' names, and authors do not see reviewers' names. Some journals use an AI assistant to help their editors screen submissions; the journal's page and the submission form say when this applies, and the Privacy Policy explains what it involves. The assistant never makes editorial decisions.

• Treat every manuscript as confidential. Don't share it, keep copies after the review, use its content for your own work, or upload it to outside tools, including AI services.
• Declare any competing interest when you accept, and decline if you can't judge the work fairly.
• Accept invitations only with the account for the address the invitation was sent to.

• You are responsible for your journal's editorial policies and decisions, its published content, and the fees it charges.
• Follow recognised standards of publication ethics, such as those of the Committee on Publication Ethics (COPE), including handling conflicts of interest. Unisphere stops editors from handling manuscripts they wrote, but the duty remains yours.
• A new journal is reviewed by our administrators before it can add staff or appear in the public directory. We may decline or suspend a journal that breaks these terms.

You keep the copyright in what you submit or deposit. You give us a worldwide, non-exclusive, royalty-free licence to host, copy, display, distribute and preserve it as needed to run Unisphere, including sending manuscripts to editors and reviewers.

Published articles and repository records are made available to everyone under the open licence shown on their page (for example CC BY 4.0), as chosen when they were published.

Publication is permanent. A published article or repository record cannot be unpublished or deleted, because others may have cited it. Its details can be corrected and its files replaced by a new version; earlier versions are kept. Serious problems are handled through corrections or retractions under the journal's policy.

A journal may charge an article processing charge (APC) once a manuscript is accepted. The amount and currency are shown on the journal's page before you submit. Some journals charge nothing.

• Payment goes directly to the journal, through Stripe. The journal is the seller: the charge appears on your statement under the journal's name, and the journal handles refunds, receipts, disputes and any tax due on the charge. We never see or store your card details.
• Unisphere charges the journal a platform commission of 10% of each APC paid, on the amount actually paid after any waiver. It is taken from the journal's share by Stripe and is never added to what the author pays. Stripe's own processing fees are also deducted from the journal's share.
• Authors from countries in the Research4Life programme can claim a full or partial waiver when the invoice is issued. You must claim only a waiver you are eligible for; we or the journal may ask for evidence and withdraw a waiver claimed in error.
• You can also ask the journal's editor-in-chief for a waiver; the decision is theirs.
• If you pay twice, pay more than was due, pay after a waiver, or pay the wrong amount or currency, the payment is refunded: the journal refunds it, and we return our commission on it.

A journal that charges an APC must first connect its own Stripe account and accept Stripe's terms for it. Until that account can take payments, the journal cannot set a charge above zero, and any charge it set earlier cannot be paid online.

Don't use Unisphere to:

• submit fabricated, falsified or plagiarised work, or manipulate peer review;
• impersonate anyone or misrepresent your affiliation;
• upload malware, or files that infringe others' rights or contain unlawful material;
• deposit personal data about others without a lawful basis and their consent where it is needed;
• send spam, harvest addresses, or probe or overload the service;
• get around limits, security measures or access controls.

We may suspend or close an account, or suspend a journal, that breaks these terms or puts others at risk. A suspended account can still read its own work but cannot start or act on submissions, reviews or deposits.

You can ask us to close your account at any time by writing to privacy@unisphere.com. Published scholarly content stays published, credited to the names it was published under.

Unisphere is provided “as is”. Content is the responsibility of its authors and journals; we don't endorse it or guarantee it is accurate. We work to keep the service available and your data safe, but we can't promise it will be uninterrupted or error-free.

To the extent the law allows, we are not liable for indirect or consequential losses, and our total liability to you for any claim is limited to the fees you paid us in the twelve months before it arose. Nothing in these terms limits liability that cannot be limited by law.

We may update these terms. When we make a material change we will ask you to accept the new version the next time you sign in, and show its effective date here. If you don't accept it, you can stop using Unisphere and ask us to close your account.

These terms are governed by the laws of the State of New York, USA. Disputes will be decided by the courts located in New York County, New York, unless the law of the place where you live gives you the right to bring proceedings there.

EldoNova+ Technologies, operator of Unisphere. Questions about these terms: privacy@unisphere.com.