To join the Research Cooperative, regular members accept the following Terms of Service (TOS). This is the full text referred to in the short version shown when members first join.

TOS updated 11th May, 2018. 

Note: the Terms of Service (TOS) of this network have not changed substantially since establishment, despite changes in wording). Any substantial change in the TOS will be notified to all members by a broadcast message. Updates that are made for clarification will not be broadcast.

This agreement applies to your free, regular membership of the Research Cooperative (for all regular   categories:  Standard Regular Member, Advanced Regular Member, Founding Regular Member).

The Research Cooperative is an open access network that can be viewed by any user of the Internet. Most content published by members at the Research Cooperative, including member profile pages, is automatically visible to all visitors.

From time to time, content may not be shown if there are technical issues in our computer system. Content that is offensive, irrelevant, misleading, academically unethical, or spam, will be deleted by a site administrator or appointed moderator. We ask members to help by contacting Admin as soon as possible when spam is seen (see "Contact" in Home menu). 

You may ask to have your account and profile pages deleted, and all content removed, at any time (see "Close my account" tab in Home menu).

Please do not publish your personal email address, unless you can disguise it with non-standard letters to discourage automated copying by unknown third parties, e.g. adam-at-XYZ.com , not adam@XYZ.com

Email addresses provided when creating a member account at the Research Cooperative are only visible to site administrators, and may be used by Admin for direct communication with members, or to test that a member account is active. Accounts with inactive email addresses will eventually be deleted.

Member email addresses will occasionally be visible to third-party technical service providers employed to help in development of our website and system. Such providers are expected to not download, copy or transfer member addresses or profile details. However, the Research Cooperative cannot be responsible for any breach of confidence by third party providers, and has no technical or financial means to prevent a breach of confidence. We can change service providers however. 

If you believe there has been, or may have been, a breach of confidence, please inform Admin (see "Contact" in Home menu).

Service offers and requests are provided by members of the Research Cooperative, and only members can provide such offers or requests.

Legal and moral responsibilities for offers and requests are primarily the responsibilities of each sender, but the Research Cooperative accepts responsibility for moderation of irrelevant spam or misleading offers and requests.

Offers that take the form of advertising for commercial services are perfectly acceptable, if the services offered are relevant to educational , scientific, and technical communication.

We ask all members to share this responsibility by alerting Admin (see Contact under the Home tab) when inappropriate offers or requests are found.

The Research Cooperative reserves the right to moderate and remove content deemed to be inappropriate, without notification to the sender.

Members can send private notes to each other, using our internal messaging system.

Please check your account settings to manage how others can communicate with you (look under your chosen profile name in the main menu, after log in). When you use the "Follow" button to follow another member, that member will be able to send you private notes. You can "Unfollow" other members at any time.

Private notes will be forwarded without the destination email address being shown to sender, and without the sender email address being shown to recipient. 

Private notes are not usually seen by Admin, but are subject to this Agreement. Do not send notes that are offensive, spam, or otherwise contrary to the aims of our network to other members. If you receive such a note, please do not reply but advise Admin as soon as possible, with full details, to request mediation. Admin can look in the system to investigate private notes if necessary.

The design and content of this website, including the logo, are copyright of The Research Cooperative, unless contributed by an identified member or obtained from another source (third party) by the Research Cooperative or a member. 

Author rights and copyright for content contributed by a member (or obtained from another source) belong to the member (or the other source). "Content" includes your messages, images, texts, logos, and uploaded files that can be seen by any visitor to our website. By publishing content on the Research Cooperative website, you agree to allow others to use your content under our Creative Commons License. 

The Research Cooperative is licensed under a  Creative Commons Attribution-Noncommercial-No Derivative Works 3.0 Unported License

Visitors and members may reuse original content (first published on the Research Cooperative website)  for non-commercial purposes by crediting the author(s) and linking back to our site.

Membership of the The Research Cooperative is free for all regular members. The Research Cooperative reserves the right to close any member account, or all member accounts, at any time for any reason. We have provided continuous service since 2001 and plan to provide continuous service into the forseeable future.