Terms of Service

These Terms govern your use of the Scholar Feed website (scholarfeed.org), API (api.scholarfeed.org), and the scholar-feed-mcp client (together, the “Service”), operated by Yang Gao, an individual based in California, USA. By using the Service you agree to these Terms.

The Service

Scholar Feed provides search and analysis over a corpus of academic papers, including semantic search, citation and co-author graphs, full-text extraction, embeddings, and saved libraries, collections, and watches. Paper metadata is derived from public sources such as arXiv.

Accounts and API keys

You may use the read API anonymously at a reduced rate limit. Higher limits and account features require a free or Pro account and an API key. You are responsible for keeping your API key confidential and for all activity under your account. Tell us promptly if you believe your key has been compromised.

Acceptable use

You agree not to:

• exceed, evade, or interfere with rate limits and quotas, or share a key to pool quota across unrelated users;
• scrape, bulk-export, or redistribute the corpus or the Service's outputs in order to build or train a competing product;
• attempt to disrupt, reverse engineer, or gain unauthorized access to the Service or its infrastructure;
• use the Service unlawfully or to infringe others' rights.

We may suspend or terminate access that violates these Terms or threatens the Service.

Plans, billing, and changes

Free and Pro tiers and their limits are described at scholarfeed.org. Paid subscriptions are billed through our payment processor, Stripe, on a recurring basis until cancelled, and access is granted for the period you have paid for. We may change features, limits, or pricing prospectively, with notice for material changes.

Content and intellectual property

Paper titles, abstracts, and metadata belong to their respective authors and sources; the Service surfaces and analyzes them but claims no ownership of them. Machine-generated summaries, scores, and analyses are provided for convenience and may be inaccurate or incomplete. The Scholar Feed software, design, and branding remain ours. The scholar-feed-mcp client is provided under the MIT license in its repository; these Terms govern your use of the hosted Service it connects to.

Disclaimers

THE SERVICE IS PROVIDED “AS IS” WITHOUT WARRANTIES OF ANY KIND. We do not warrant that results, summaries, novelty scores, or citation data are accurate, complete, or current, and they are not a substitute for your own review of the underlying papers. Availability and rate limits may change.

Limitation of liability

To the maximum extent permitted by law, Yang Gao will not be liable for indirect, incidental, or consequential damages, or for lost profits or data, arising from your use of the Service. Our total liability for any claim is limited to the greater of the amount you paid us in the 12 months before the claim or USD 100.

Privacy

Your use of the Service is also governed by our Privacy Policy. It describes the request metadata and content we process, including that we may log query content and the identifiers of papers you act on.

Termination

You may stop using the Service at any time. We may suspend or end access for breach of these Terms or to protect the Service. Sections that by their nature should survive termination (intellectual property, disclaimers, limitation of liability) will survive.

Changes to these Terms

We may update these Terms. Material changes will be posted here with a new effective date; continued use after that constitutes acceptance.

Governing law

These Terms are governed by the laws of the State of California, USA, without regard to conflict of law rules. Disputes will be resolved in the state or federal courts located in Los Angeles County, California.

Contact

Questions: yang@mail.scholarfeed.org.