Terms of use

OSCR (Open Scientific Code Registry) is a free registry of the code published with scientific papers, run by one person, its owner. Using it means accepting these terms, the acceptable-use policy and the community guidelines; how data is handled is in the privacy statement.

1. The service

OSCR reads published papers, links them to their authors' code, keeps copies of scripts whose licence allows it, and shows which lines of code implement which passage of a paper (the tracing maps). Its GitHub side lets researchers link, create and work on repositories, open research issues about a paper's code, and follow papers and people. It is free, without advertising, and may change, pause or stop; it is given as it is, without warranty of availability or accuracy, as far as the law allows.

2. Accounts

You sign in with ORCID, GitHub or Google; one account per person. You are responsible for what is done with your account, your personal tokens and your webhooks. An account made to get around a suspension, or by software on its own, may be closed.

3. The GitHub side

Repositories live in their owners' own GitHub accounts: they stay under GitHub's terms of service and GitHub's own rules, which OSCR does not change. Every write OSCR makes on GitHub is yours, authorized by you on GitHub one action at a time; OSCR keeps no GitHub token. Its GitHub App acts only for itself (a check on pull requests, reading after a webhook). What OSCR adds (research issues, stars, lists, follows, profiles, tracing maps, notifications) is its own, under these terms.

4. What you own, and the licence you give

• You keep every right to what you write and publish: your code stays under the licence you chose, in your repository.
• By writing in OSCR (a research issue, a comment, a profile, a list, a correction), you allow it to store, show and copy that text on its pages, in its public files and through its API, for as long as it is published, and others to quote it as science allows. You may delete your own words.
• Script copies are made only when the code's licence allows redistribution, and say where they come from. The registry does not copy the papers themselves; it links to them.
• The catalogue's own data (the records, the tracing maps) is published for reuse; a tracing map an author validated may get a DOI on Zenodo, with that author as creator.

5. The rules, and what happens when they are broken

The acceptable-use policy says what is not allowed. Anyone may report something from the "Report" link beside it. The owner reads every report and may hide a comment, an issue, a repository from the registry's pages, a profile's words, or suspend an account (its writes stop, its tokens are revoked, its webhooks paused, and its activity is hidden). Each decision has a public notice without the hidden words (the notices), and the person concerned reads the owner's words on their page.

Suspension and appeal

A person whose content or account was hidden may appeal once, from their page, within a reasonable time, saying why the decision is wrong; a copyright takedown may be answered with a counter-notice (takedowns). The owner answers there. An appeal accepted restores what was hidden.

6. Limits

OSCR runs within free plans: daily limits apply to each account and to the whole service (the limits). Getting around them (with several accounts, or with automated requests beyond the API's limits) is not allowed.

7. Liability

[To be completed by the owner: the limitation of liability that the owner's law allows, and the law and courts that apply.]

8. Changes and contact

These terms carry their date; a change that matters is announced on the site before it applies. There is no email contact: ask in the site (a report, your data rights).