Terms of Service

These terms govern the use of stemreview.org and the material published on it. They apply to anyone who visits the site. There is no account to open, nothing to buy, and nothing to sign, so acceptance works the way it does for any public page: the terms are posted, and using the site is what brings them into effect. Anyone who does not accept them should stop using the site. They are not a contract for a service, because no service is sold and nothing is owed in either direction beyond what is set out below.

Three other standing documents sit alongside this one, and each covers its own ground. The Editorial Policies describe how articles are produced, sourced, and corrected. The Privacy Policy describes what is recorded when a page is requested. The Ethical Guidelines for Reviewers set out the standards that would govern a reviewer where the publication commissions assessment of unpublished work. Where one of those documents covers a subject, it is the place to look, and these terms do not restate it.

Everything published on STEM Review is free to read, and several ordinary uses need no permission. You may read the site, print or save copies for your own reference, and quote a reasonable extract in your own writing, teaching, or research, provided the quotation is attributed to STEM Review and, where the medium allows, linked to the article it came from. Extracts should be short enough that a reader still has reason to go to the original.

The RSS output at /feed/ may be used to follow new publication in a reader. Reproducing a whole article is a different matter, whether on a website, in a newsletter, in a course pack, or in print. So are translations, adaptations, and any commercial reuse. Those need permission, and the route for asking is set out under Ownership and Permissions below.

Search-engine crawling that observes the site's robots directives is expected and welcome. Bulk and systematic retrieval is not covered by the permissions above. That includes downloading the archive in whole or in part, harvesting article text or images into a separate database or corpus, and extracting material to train, fine-tune, or evaluate machine-learning systems. None of that is prohibited on principle—it is simply a use that requires asking first, and the route for asking is the same one used for republication.

Reporting on published work, with sources named and quotations attributed, is a different activity from ingesting a body of text as training data. The restriction stated here is a condition on reuse rather than a technical control: it binds anyone who relies on the permissions granted on this page, whether or not the site's machine-readable directives repeat it.

Automated access that degrades the site for other readers is a separate problem, and requests may be rate-limited or blocked when they do. The site runs on infrastructure with finite capacity, and there is no arrangement under which bulk retrieval takes priority over people reading articles.

Articles, headlines, images, page design, and the STEM Review name and its presentation are protected by copyright and related rights, whether or not a notice appears on a given page. The rights in them are held by the publication or used with permission. Material that originates with someone else—a photograph, a chart, a figure from a paper, an extended quotation—remains theirs whether or not a credit line appears beside it on this site, and permission to reuse that material has to come from them rather than from here.

Requests for any use beyond the standing permissions go to info@unipub.org under the subject label [Permissions]. What a request should contain is set out on the contact page. No standing licence schedule exists.

Anyone who believes material published here infringes their copyright should write to the same address. Identify the page, quote or describe the specific text or image at issue, and describe the work it is said to copy in enough detail that it can be found and compared. Material that should not be here comes down.

Links to STEM Review are welcome and require no permission. That includes links to the home page, to a discipline page such as Space, and to individual articles. Deep links to specific pieces are preferred to links that only reach the front page, because they take a reader to the work being cited.

What is not permitted is presenting the site or its material in a way that obscures where it came from. Do not load the site inside a frame or wrapper so that it appears to be part of another publication. Do not use the publication's name or presentation in a way that suggests association, sponsorship, or endorsement that does not exist. Do not reproduce an article without attribution to STEM Review, and do not alter one and present the result as something published here.

Interfering with the operation of the site is out of bounds, as is attempting to reach systems that are not open to the public, probing or circumventing technical controls, and any use that is unlawful where the reader is.

Coverage of science and technology depends on citing outside work: papers, preprints, datasets, regulatory filings, technical documentation, and company statements. Links to those sources are references, not endorsements. They indicate that a source was consulted, not that its claims, its methods, or its authors are vouched for. Sources that are cited critically are linked on the same footing as sources that are cited approvingly.

Nothing at the other end of a link is under this publication's control. Pages change, move, and disappear after an article is published, and links are not rechecked on a continuous basis. Following a link means leaving this site, and the destination's own terms and privacy practices apply once you arrive.

The site is published as it stands. Nothing here is warranted to be complete, still current, or right for whatever you intend to do with it. Reporting reflects the best understanding available when it was published, and in these subjects that understanding moves: results are revised, preprints fail review, and figures are restated. Reports of error are handled under the Editorial Policies rather than here.

Availability is not guaranteed either. Pages may be unreachable, and articles and features may be changed, moved, or removed without notice—an article that is no longer published stops resolving, and the address returns a not-found page. The site depends on infrastructure it does not operate, and an interruption anywhere in that chain takes pages down.

Coverage here is journalism and general information. It is not investment or financial advice, and it is not medical, legal, or other professional advice. Reporting on a company, a technology, a treatment, or a market is not a recommendation to act, and no article should be treated as guidance on a particular decision. Anyone facing one should consult someone qualified to advise on it.

To the fullest extent the law allows, STEM Review and the people who produce and operate it are not liable for loss arising from use of this site or from reliance on anything published on it. That covers money lost, work lost, time lost, and any knock-on loss, foreseeable or not. Where the law where you are reading does not permit an exclusion of that kind, it does not apply to you.

If any provision here is found unenforceable, it is severed and the rest continues to apply. A term that is not enforced on one occasion is not given up.

These terms may be revised. The date at the foot of this page is when it was last changed, and because there is no reader account and no channel through which a notice could be pushed, this page is the only place a revision appears. Continued use after a revision means the revised terms apply. Questions about this document, permission requests, and copyright complaints all go to info@unipub.org.