1. What AbsClust is
AbsClust is a non-commercial research project. On the website absclust.com (“Site”), Quiddity Technologies GbR, Lübecker Straße 3, 18057 Rostock, Germany (“we”, “us”) provides a platform for scientific article search, filtering, and knowledge extraction (“Service”), hosted on infrastructure provided by the University of Rostock. You can reach us by email at team@absclust.com.
The Service is provided free of charge. There are no paid plans, no subscriptions, and nothing is sold through the Site. We do not enter into any commercial relationship with you by letting you use it.
By using the Service you accept these Terms of Service. If you do not accept them, please do not use the Service. These Terms are governed by German law; where they do not address a situation, the Bürgerliches Gesetzbuch (BGB) applies.
2. Using the Service
You may use the Service if you are at least 18 years old. If you use it on behalf of an organization, you confirm that you are authorized to do so.
Some features require an account. You are responsible for keeping your login credentials confidential and for everything that happens under your account. If you believe your credentials have been compromised, change your password and let us know.
Beyond that, use the Service however you find useful — for research, teaching, commercial work, or anything else. We only ask that you do not do the following:
- Break the law or infringe anyone else’s rights while using the Service.
- Attack, overload, or attempt to gain unauthorized access to the Service or the infrastructure it runs on.
- Upload confidential, personal, or sensitive information (see section 3).
We may suspend an account if we have reasonable grounds to believe it is being used in one of these ways, or in a way that could create liability for us, the University of Rostock, or other users. You can stop using the Service and delete your account at any time, without notice or reason.
3. What the Service does, and what it does not guarantee
AbsClust lets you search open scientific article databases, visualize similarities between articles (“AbsClustMaps”), ask questions about a corpus, extract structured information from a set of articles, and upload your own PDFs as a custom dataset to use those features on your own material.
AbsClust searches public databases and links out to open access articles hosted by third parties; it does not provide the full text itself. Retrieving and reading those articles is subject to the licences and terms of the respective sources.
Question answering and information extraction rely on AI models, which are not always accurate. Even where a correct answer exists in the data, we do not guarantee that it will be found or that what you get back is correct. Treat every result as a starting point and verify it against the sources.
The Service is provided on an “as-is” basis and is under active development. There are no uptime or availability guarantees, and you may encounter bugs. Bug reports and support requests are welcome at team@absclust.com (English only); we aim to respond within 5 working days, but this is a research project and not a commercial support commitment.
4. Data you upload
You are solely responsible for everything you upload. In particular, you must:
- Ensure that uploaded content does not infringe the intellectual property or other rights of third parties.
- Confirm that no licences or fees are required or incurred through your use of the uploaded content.
- Only upload published scientific articles in PDF format. Do not upload confidential or unpublished material.
- Do not upload personal data about identifiable individuals, and in particular no special categories of personal data within the meaning of Art. 9 GDPR — including data concerning health, genetic or biometric data, and data revealing racial or ethnic origin, political opinions, religious or philosophical beliefs, trade union membership, or a person’s sex life or sexual orientation.
Uploaded data is stored on servers operated for AbsClust at the University of Rostock and is accessible only to you. It is your responsibility to check whether the licences of the articles you upload permit such storage and access, and you are liable for any consequences arising from your uploads. You can delete a dataset at any time, or request removal of your data or deletion of your account by writing to team@absclust.com.
The Service is not designed to process special categories of personal data, and we may remove any dataset that we become aware breaches these restrictions.
AbsClust is not a data storage platform and does not guarantee that uploaded data will remain available indefinitely. Keep your own copies.
5. Software licence
The AbsClust software is open source, released under the Apache License 2.0. You are free to use, modify, distribute, and self-host it under the terms of that licence — see the repository at https://github.com/QuiddityAI/InsightHub for the source code and the full licence text.
These Terms of Service govern only your use of the instance we host at absclust.com. They do not restrict any right the Apache License 2.0 grants you in the software itself. The AbsClust name and logo are not covered by the software licence.
6. No warranty and limitation of liability
The Service is provided free of charge, without any warranty of any kind, and without any assurance as to availability, accuracy, fitness for a particular purpose, or freedom from defects.
We are liable only for damage caused intentionally or by gross negligence. Liability for slight negligence is excluded. This does not affect our liability for injury to life, body, or health, for damage caused by the fraudulent concealment of a defect, or under the German Product Liability Act (Produkthaftungsgesetz), none of which can be excluded by agreement.
Within these limits, we are in particular not liable for loss of data, loss of profits, interruptions of the Service, results produced by AI models, or damage arising from decisions you take based on the Service. The University of Rostock provides infrastructure only and is not a party to these Terms.
7. Personal data
How we handle personal data is described in our Privacy Policy at https://absclust.com/privacy-policy.
8. Changes and contact
As a research project, we may change, suspend, or discontinue any part of the Service, or these Terms, at any time. Because the software is open source, you can always continue running your own instance. Material changes to these Terms will be reflected in the effective date above.
For anything not covered here, write to us at team@absclust.com.