AI Assistant Terms
Last updated August 20, 2026
These terms cover the MyResearchFocus AI assistant specifically, and sit alongside our Terms of Service and Privacy Policy. You accept them once, in the assistant, before your first conversation.
1. What it can see
The assistant can read the data you already have access to in MyResearchFocus — your lists, members, projects, publications, grant records and other data in your account. It cannot see anything you could not open yourself, and it cannot see other customers’ data.
2. What leaves our systems
Your questions, and the records needed to answer them, are sent to a third-party model provider. Every request carries an instruction not to retain the content once it has been answered and not to train on it; a provider that does not meet those conditions is not used. See our Privacy Policy for who those providers are.
3. It can be wrong, and it is not advice
The assistant searches and summarises your data; it does not verify it. It can be wrong about anything — a number, a record, a date, a relationship or a person. Check anything you intend to act on.
It does not give legal, financial, compliance, human-resources or research-administration advice, and its answers are not a substitute for your institution’s own review. Questions about what a funder allows, what a policy requires, or what you may report are for the people at your institution whose job that is.
4. Keep a person in the loop
Do not use the assistant to make automated decisions about people — decisions that take effect without someone reviewing them — and do not rely on it as the sole basis for a decision about a person’s funding, employment, evaluation, promotion or standing. It is there to help you find and summarise your own records, not to reach conclusions about anybody.
5. What not to type into it
Do not enter protected health information, student education records, export-controlled or classified research, payment card details, credentials, or other information subject to special legal protection — even where you are permitted to hold that information elsewhere. The assistant is a free-text box, and what you type into it is sent to a model provider and stored with your conversation.
6. The answers are yours, and they are not exclusive
As between you and us, you own the answers the assistant gives you. Because of how these systems work, answers are not unique: another customer asking a similar question may receive a similar answer, and nothing here gives you rights over anybody else’s.
7. Your conversations are stored with your account
They are kept so you can reopen them. You can delete any conversation at any time, and deleting your account deletes all of them along with your assistant usage history.
8. We may use your conversations to improve MyResearchFocus
That includes understanding what people ask for, measuring whether the answers were good, the ratings you leave on them, and developing, evaluating and training our own models. A small number of our staff may read conversations for those purposes, under confidentiality obligations. We do not sell conversations, and we do not share them with third parties to train their models.
9. Changes to the assistant and to these terms
How much you can use the assistant in a given month is capped by an allowance shown in the panel. We may change, limit or withdraw the feature, and we may revise these terms; if we revise them in substance we will ask you to agree again before your next conversation.