Terms of Service & End-User Licence Agreement
These Terms govern access to and use of BioProGuide (bioproguide.com).
1. Acceptance of these Terms
By creating an account or otherwise using BioProGuide (the "Service"), you agree to be bound by these Terms of Service and End-User Licence Agreement (the "Terms"). If you do not accept these Terms, you must not use the Service.
2. Eligibility
You must be at least 16 years old and have the legal capacity to enter into a binding contract to use the Service. The Service is intended for use by students, academic researchers, and professionals working in biotechnology and related fields for research and educational purposes.
3. Account registration
- One account per person. Multiple accounts for the same individual are not permitted without our prior written consent.
- You are responsible for keeping your login credentials confidential and for all activity conducted through your account.
- You must provide accurate information at registration and keep it up to date.
- You must complete email verification before the account becomes active.
- We may suspend or terminate accounts that we reasonably believe to be fraudulent, duplicated, or in violation of these Terms.
4. Licence grant
Subject to your compliance with these Terms, we grant you a limited, personal, non-exclusive, non-transferable, non-sublicensable, revocable licence to access and use the Service through its official web interface for your own research and educational purposes. This licence does not grant you any right in the Service's source code, algorithms, models, or data.
5. Restrictions
You agree NOT to:
- reverse-engineer, decompile, disassemble, de-obfuscate, or otherwise attempt to derive or reconstruct the source code, algorithms, scientific models, or data structures underlying the Service;
- copy, reproduce, modify, adapt, translate, or create derivative works of the Service or any part thereof;
- redistribute, resell, sublicense, rent, lease, or otherwise make the Service (or any portion or output thereof) available to third parties;
- use the Service for any commercial purpose without a separate written licence agreement with us;
- access the Service by automated means, including but not limited to bots, scripts, crawlers, headless browsers, or any form of bulk, scripted, or machine-to-machine access;
- scrape, harvest, or mirror the Service, its content, or its outputs;
- circumvent or attempt to circumvent authentication, rate limits, feature gates, or any other access control;
- use the Service, or outputs produced by the Service, to develop, train, fine-tune, benchmark, or evaluate a competing product, service, dataset, or model;
- perform security research, penetration testing, or vulnerability scanning against the Service without our prior written consent;
- remove, alter, or obscure copyright, trademark, or other proprietary notices on the Service;
- use the Service in violation of any applicable law, regulation, or third-party right.
6. Intellectual property
The Service — including all software, obfuscated JavaScript bundles, scientific models, solvers, heuristics, algorithms, text, user interface, graphics, visualisations, and aggregate data (excluding User Content as defined in Section 7) — is owned by Alexander Pekarsky and is protected by copyright, trademark, trade-secret, and other intellectual property laws of Austria, the European Union, and applicable international treaties. All rights not expressly granted to you under these Terms are reserved.
7. User Content
"User Content" means any input you provide to the Service (including protein sequences, FASTA files, structural parameters, and process parameters) and any output generated for you by the Service. You retain full ownership of User Content. We do not claim any licence, right, or interest in User Content.
Because User Content is processed entirely in your browser and is not transmitted to our servers, you are solely responsible for its storage, security, retention, and backup. We cannot recover User Content if you lose it.
8. Disclaimer — Research Use Only
The Service is provided strictly for research and educational purposes. Outputs are computational estimates produced by scientific models and are subject to inherent uncertainty, simplifications, and limitations. The Service is NOT intended for and MUST NOT be used as a sole or primary basis for:
- clinical decisions, patient care, or use involving human or animal subjects;
- drug-development milestones, investigational-product release, or pharmaceutical quality control;
- Good Manufacturing Practice (GMP) manufacturing, process-validation filings, or regulatory submissions to any health authority;
- any financial, operational, safety, or health decision where independent expert verification has not been performed.
You are solely responsible for independently verifying any output of the Service before relying on it for any purpose.
9. No warranty
10. Limitation of liability
Nothing in these Terms excludes or limits liability for death or personal injury caused by our negligence, for fraud or fraudulent misrepresentation, or for any other liability that cannot be excluded or limited under applicable law. In particular, mandatory consumer-protection rights of consumers in the European Union remain unaffected.
11. Indemnification
You agree to indemnify, defend, and hold harmless Alexander Pekarsky from and against any claims, damages, losses, liabilities, costs, and expenses (including reasonable legal fees) arising out of or in connection with (a) your use of the Service, (b) your violation of these Terms, or (c) your infringement of any third-party right.
12. Pricing and fee changes
The Service is currently provided free of charge. We reserve the right to introduce paid tiers, premium features, usage-based pricing, or other commercial arrangements at any time, and to modify or discontinue the free tier. Material changes to pricing or to the scope of the free tier will be announced at least 30 days in advance by email to registered users. Continued use of the Service after the effective date of any such change constitutes acceptance of the new terms.
13. Modifications to the Service
We may modify, update, suspend, limit, feature-gate, or discontinue the Service (or any part of it) at any time, with or without prior notice. Some features may be marked as "beta", "preview", or "coming soon"; such features are provided on an experimental basis and may be changed or removed at any time. We are not liable to you or any third party for any such modification or discontinuation.
14. Modifications to these Terms
We may update these Terms from time to time. The current version is always published at bioproguide.com/terms with the revision date. Material changes will be announced on the Service and by email to registered users at least 14 days before they take effect. Continued use of the Service after the effective date constitutes acceptance of the updated Terms. If you do not agree to the updated Terms, you must stop using the Service and may delete your account.
15. Termination
You may terminate your account at any time from your account-settings page or by emailing us. We may suspend or terminate your account at any time, with or without notice, if we reasonably believe you have violated these Terms, created a risk to us or to other users, or engaged in conduct that is abusive, fraudulent, or otherwise harmful. Upon termination, the licence granted in Section 4 immediately ends, and you must cease all use of the Service. Sections 5, 6, 8, 9, 10, 11, 16, 17, 18 survive termination.
16. Governing law and jurisdiction
These Terms are governed by the laws of the Republic of Austria, excluding its conflict-of-laws rules and the United Nations Convention on Contracts for the International Sale of Goods (CISG).
For disputes arising out of or in connection with these Terms: (a) between us and a consumer resident in the European Union, the mandatory consumer-protection rules of the consumer's country of residence apply, and the consumer may bring proceedings in either the courts of Austria or the courts of their country of residence; (b) between us and any party that is not a consumer, the exclusive jurisdiction shall be the competent courts of Vienna, Austria.
17. Severability
If any provision of these Terms is held to be invalid, illegal, or unenforceable, the remaining provisions shall remain in full force and effect. The invalid provision shall be replaced by a provision that most closely reflects the original commercial intent while being valid and enforceable.
18. Entire agreement
These Terms, together with the Privacy Policy, constitute the entire agreement between you and us regarding the Service and supersede all prior agreements and understandings, whether written or oral, relating to the subject matter hereof.
19. Contact
Questions about these Terms: legal@bioproguide.com