Terms of service

§ 1

The agreement

Citerra is operated by Citerra GbR, a partnership of Fadi Al Eliwi, Fares Al Eliwi, Mauro Maus and Yefan Jiang. Its address is c/o Collective Incubator, Jülicher Straße 209q/s, 52070 Aachen, Germany. The agreement is with that partnership.

Using Citerra means accepting these terms. If you are accepting them for a university, a department or a company, you confirm that you are able to bind that organization. The agreement is then with the organization rather than with you personally.

Citerra is a service for academic writing. It provides an editor, a source library, literature search, citation handling, a reader and an AI assistant, as described on this website.

§ 2

Accounts

Every document belongs to an organization, and every subscription attaches to an organization rather than to a person. An organization admin controls membership, roles, AI settings and billing.

You are responsible for keeping your sign-in credentials secure and for what happens under your account. Tell Citerra promptly if you believe an account has been compromised.

Citerra is not intended for anyone under 16.

§ 3

Acceptable use

Use Citerra for your own research and writing, and for the work of your organization. The following are not permitted, and Citerra may suspend access to stop them.

Breaking the law

Using the service for anything unlawful, or uploading content you have no right to upload.

Circumventing limits

Working around usage allowances, rate limits, or the controls an organization admin has set.

Attacking the service

Probing, scanning or overloading the infrastructure, or attempting to reach data belonging to another organization. Good-faith security research is welcome and has its own route on the security page.

Reselling it

Making the service available to people outside your organization as if it were your own, or using it to build a competing product.

§ 4

Your content stays yours

You own everything you put into Citerra and everything you write with it. Nothing in these terms transfers rights in your manuscripts, your sources, your data or your results.

Citerra needs a limited permission to run the service. That permission covers storing your content and processing it so that features such as search, compilation and retrieval work. It also covers displaying the content back to you and to the people you share it with. The permission exists for that purpose and ends when the content is deleted.

Your content is never used to train a model. That is a commitment rather than a setting, and it covers documents, sources, chats, and anything derived from them.

Every document exports as .tex and .bib at any time, and an organization admin can export the whole organization. Ending the agreement does not strand your work.

§ 5

What the assistant writes

The assistant drafts from the sources in a document's library, and every claim it makes carries the passage it came from. Nothing it writes enters a manuscript until you accept it.

Accepted output is yours, on the same terms as anything else you write in Citerra. Citerra claims no rights in it.

Retrieval is scoped to a document's own library, and a citation key that cannot be resolved is removed before the text reaches you. That is how the system is built rather than an instruction it is given. It is not a guarantee that a generated sentence is correct: you remain the author, and checking what you submit is your responsibility.

Journals and institutions set their own policies on AI assistance. Complying with the one that applies to you, including any disclosure it requires, is your responsibility. Citerra labels and records every AI-authored change so that you can describe exactly what was used.

§ 6

Availability

Citerra aims to keep the service available and to give notice before planned maintenance that will interrupt it. Citerra promises no uptime figure here, and will state one when a measured record exists to stand behind it.

§ 7

When a feature changes

Features change. Citerra announces a capability before removing it, with what replaces it and how to move. The same notice covers anything that affects a document you already have open.

§ 8

Fees

Free use is free. Paid editions are billed to the organization on the interval chosen at purchase, in advance, and taxes are added where they apply.

Cancelling stops the next renewal and leaves access in place until the end of the paid period. Fees already paid are not refunded on a pro-rata basis, except where the law requires it.

Prices can change, and a change never applies to a period already paid for. An organization is told before a renewal at a new price.

§ 9

Ending the agreement

You can stop using Citerra at any time and delete your organization from its settings. Deletion removes the organization's documents, files and search indexes after a 30-day grace window, and can be cancelled at any point inside it.

Citerra may suspend or end access for a serious or repeated breach of the acceptable use section. Citerra says why, unless the law prevents it. Where the breach can be fixed, notice comes first.

§ 10

What is not warranted

The service is provided as it is. Citerra does not warrant that the service will be uninterrupted or error-free. It does not warrant that a generated sentence, a resolved citation or a compiled document will be fit for a particular submission.

§ 11

Limits on liability

Nothing in these terms limits liability for intent, gross negligence, injury to life or health, or anything else that cannot be limited by law. Subject to that, liability is limited to foreseeable damage typical of this kind of agreement. It is also capped at the fees paid in the 12 months before the event.

Citerra is not liable for lost data where an export was available and not taken. It is not liable for a missed submission deadline, or for a decision made by a journal, a funder or an institution.

§ 12

Governing law

German law applies, without its conflict-of-law rules, and the UN Convention on Contracts for the International Sale of Goods does not apply. Consumer protections that cannot be set aside by contract are unaffected.

If any part of these terms is unenforceable, the rest stays in force.

§ 13

Changes to these terms

Material changes are announced on this page at least 30 days before they take effect, with the date at the top updated to match. Continuing to use the service after that date means accepting the new version. An organization that does not accept it can end the agreement and take its data with it.