Terms of Service

PaperTrail is an independent project run by an individual. It is not a company, and it is not affiliated with, endorsed by, or operated on behalf of any university, department, or funding body. Naming a university in the app means only that we hold records about researchers who publish there.

These terms are an agreement between you and the operator of PaperTrail. Using the service means you accept them. If you do not, do not use it.

You must be at least 16 years old to hold an account. PaperTrail is built for undergraduate students looking for research positions, and you should use it for that. One person, one account.

Signing in sends a one-time code to your email address. There is no password, which means anyone with access to your inbox can get into your account. Keep it secure, and tell us if you think someone else has been in yours.

You are responsible for what happens under your account, and for the accuracy of what you put in your profile.

PaperTrail gathers information about researchers from public sources, compares it against what you have written about your own interests, and helps you write to the people it surfaces. That is the whole of it. In particular:

• It does not apply on your behalf and is not involved in any decision a researcher makes about you.
• A match score is one similarity measure, not an endorsement, a ranking of people, or a judgment about whether you would be a good fit. A low score can still be the best person for you to write to.
• Whether a lab is taking students is what that lab wrote on its own website, read at some point in the past. It may be stale, and a lab that has said nothing is shown as unknown rather than guessed at.
• Information about researchers may be wrong. It is assembled automatically from public sources, including by a model searching the web. Check anything you are about to rely on, starting with the email address.
• Nothing here promises a reply, an interview, or a position.

Messages go out from your own address, under your own name, to a real academic with a real inbox. You are the sender in every sense that matters. So:

• Read the draft before sending it. Drafts are generated by a language model. They can be wrong about a paper, get a name or a title backwards, or say something you would not. What goes out is what you approved.
• Be honest. Do not misrepresent who you are, what you have done, or your academic standing, and do not claim an affiliation you do not have.
• Write to people individually. Do not use PaperTrail to send the same or near-identical message to a long list of researchers, and do not use it to build or export a mailing list. It is for writing to people you actually want to work with.
• Take no for an answer. If someone asks you not to contact them again, stop, and do not route around it with another address.
• Follow the law where you are, including the rules that apply to unsolicited email, and follow your own institution’s conduct policies.

Your email provider’s terms apply to mail sent through your connected account, and abuse can get that account suspended by them, which is not something we can undo.

We may suspend an account that uses the service to spam, harass, or mislead.

Your profile, your documents and the messages you write remain yours. You give us permission to store, copy, process and transmit them only as far as is needed to operate PaperTrail for you. Concretely, that means holding them in our database and file storage, sending the relevant parts to the AI provider that parses your resume and drafts your messages, and handing a message to your email provider so it can be sent.

That permission does not go further. We do not publish your content, show it to other users, use it to train models, or license it to anyone. It ends when you delete the content or your account, except for copies already sent somewhere at your direction, such as a message that has left your outbox.

Do not upload anything you do not have the right to share, and do not upload other people’s personal information beyond the note you write about someone you know.

Connecting a Gmail or Outlook account is optional. Doing so is governed by Google’s or Microsoft’s own terms as well as these, and what we do with the access is set out in the Privacy Policy. You can disconnect from your profile or revoke access in your provider’s settings at any time.

You agree not to:

• use PaperTrail for anything unlawful;
• impersonate anyone, or misrepresent your affiliation;
• scrape, bulk-download or systematically extract data from the service, in particular researcher contact details;
• resell, redistribute or build a competing dataset out of what you find here;
• attempt to reach accounts, data or systems that are not yours, or probe the service for weaknesses without asking us first;
• interfere with the service, or use automated systems against it beyond ordinary use of the app;
• upload malware, or anything designed to damage or intercept.

If you want to do security research on PaperTrail, write to legal@mypapertrail.org first. A good faith report gets a grateful reply, not a legal one.

PaperTrail holds professional information about academics gathered from public sources. Those people are not users of the service and have not agreed to these terms. If you are one of them and you want your record corrected or removed, write to legal@mypapertrail.org and it will be done. The Privacy Policy sets out what is held and where it comes from.

PaperTrail is free and in early access. Features may change or be removed, the service may be unavailable, and it may be discontinued. There is no uptime commitment and no support commitment. Keep your own copy of anything you would be sorry to lose, starting with your documents.

The PaperTrail name, mark, design and software belong to its operator and may not be copied or reused without permission. That does not extend to the underlying scholarly data, which comes from open sources under their own terms and which we make no ownership claim over.

PaperTrail is provided “as is” and “as available”, without warranties of any kind, express or implied, including any implied warranty of merchantability, fitness for a particular purpose, or non-infringement. We do not warrant that it will be uninterrupted, secure or error-free, nor that anything it tells you about a researcher, a lab or a match is accurate or current.

To the fullest extent permitted by law, PaperTrail and its operator are not liable for any indirect, incidental, special, consequential or punitive damages, nor for lost opportunities, lost data, or anything arising from a message you sent or did not send. Total liability for any claim is limited to the greater of one hundred US dollars or the amount you have paid to use the service. Some jurisdictions do not allow parts of this, and where that is so it does not apply to you.

You can delete your account at any time from your profile, which removes your data as described in the Privacy Policy. We may suspend or close an account that breaks these terms, or stop offering the service. The sections on your content, disclaimers, liability and governing law survive.

These terms are governed by the laws of the State of North Carolina, without regard to its conflict of laws rules. Any dispute goes to the state or federal courts located in North Carolina, and you and we agree to their jurisdiction. If you are a consumer somewhere with laws that give you a different forum, this does not take that away.

This page carries a version and a date. If something material changes, the version goes up and we will say so in the app before it takes effect. Continuing to use PaperTrail after that means the new version applies. If you would rather not accept it, delete your account.

Questions about these terms go to legal@mypapertrail.org. Questions about data go to the addresses in the Privacy Policy.