Terms of use

These terms govern your use of casrai.org and the services it offers — the Dictionary, CRediT vocabulary, GraphQL endpoint, REST feeds, machine-readable distributions, the Ask CASRAI assistant, and editorial publishing. The substantive outputs are licensed CC-BY 4.0; that licence is the load-bearing part of the relationship. These terms cover the bits CC-BY doesn’t speak to: rate limits, contributor licensing, brand use, and the boring-but-necessary disclaimers. For the trademark policy specifically see /legal/trademark; for privacy and data handling see /legal/privacy; for the imprint / responsible-person disclosure see /legal/imprint.

We expose the Dictionary through a public GraphQL endpoint at /implement/graphql, REST feeds at /feed.xml and /feed.json, and LLM-targeted bundles at /dictionary/for-llms and /credit/for-llms. Public read access is unauthenticated. Rate limits apply: 60 requests per minute per IP unauthenticated, 300 requests per minute authenticated. The limits are protective of shared infrastructure, not an artificial scarcity — if your institutional or integration workload needs more, email [email protected] and we’ll lift the cap for legitimate use.

Prefer the machine-readable distributions over scraping the HTML pages; they’re quicker for you and cheaper for us, and they let us cache aggressively at the edge. For bulk mirroring (e.g., a CRIS pulling a monthly snapshot), pin to the dated release version URL rather than the live one — see /standards/versioning for the version-pinning pattern.

The Dictionary, CRediT vocabulary, editorial guidance, and implementation playbooks are provided as is, without warranty of any kind, express or implied. The CASRAI editorial board reviews each release before sign-off and entries link to the authoritative external sources (NISO, ISO, ICMJE, COPE, NIH, FDA, EMA, ROR, ORCID, and others) but errors and omissions are possible.

For life-safety, regulatory, or compliance-critical use — clinical-trial reporting, regulatory submissions, formal grant applications, audit evidence — defer to the authoritative external source linked from the entry, not to our restatement of it. Where you find an error that matters, tell us at [email protected] and we’ll fix it within the next release window, out-of-cycle for safety-critical cases.

To the maximum extent permitted by applicable law, CASRAI is not liable for indirect, incidental, consequential, or special damages arising from use of the site or its content. The CC-BY 4.0 licence itself includes a no-warranty clause; this paragraph restates that clause in plainer terms.

Ask CASRAI answers questions using only CASRAI’s own published pages, and cites them. It is offered as is and as available, free of charge, with no warranty of any kind and no service-level commitment. Answers are drafted by a language model and may be incomplete, out of date, or simply wrong; the disclaimers in Section 4 apply to them in full, and with more force. For anything compliance-critical — a regulatory submission, a grant application, a research-integrity determination — rely on the primary source we link, not on our restatement of it, and not on a generated answer. Answers on /ask/a/… permalinks have had no editorial review; only published /ask/… pages carry a named reviewer.

Fair use. The assistant is provided for people researching a question. Per-session, per-account and per-network limits apply and are enforced; they exist because each answer costs us real compute, and they are set so that ordinary research use never notices them. Please don’t automate queries against it, distribute them across addresses or sessions to evade the limits, use it as a general-purpose language-model proxy, or attempt to extract its instructions or the underlying corpus through it. If you want the content in bulk, take it — properly and for free — from the machine-readable distributions in Section 2, which are faster for you and cheaper for us.

Your questions. What we keep, for how long, why, and how to have it deleted is set out in the privacy policy. In short: questions are logged so we can see what our documentation is missing and write it; they are scrubbed of anything resembling personal data before storage; they are never sold; and they are never used to train a third-party model, which is enforced on every request we send rather than merely asserted here. Don’t paste confidential or unpublished material into it. If a question of yours becomes the basis of a published answer page, it is rewritten and reviewed by an editor first — a raw submitted question is never shown to another user.

Availability. We may rate-limit, degrade, suspend or withdraw the assistant at any time, for any user or for everyone, without notice — including automatically, when our own cost or abuse limits are reached. Nothing else on casrai.org depends on it: the Dictionary, the CRediT documentation, the guides and every API in Section 2 remain fully usable, and the underlying content stays CC-BY 4.0 regardless.