Terms of Service

Last updated: [[DATE]]

In plain English: Littview is a web app for running systematic literature reviews. You can use it free, or subscribe to Pro for AI assistance and higher limits. Payments are handled by Paddle, which is the official seller of record — they charge your card, handle tax, and issue your invoice. You keep ownership of everything you upload; you're responsible for having the right to upload it. The AI features draft and suggest — they don't decide. You must check their output, and your review remains your scholarly work. Subscriptions renew automatically until you cancel; cancelling takes effect at the end of the period you've already paid for, and we never delete your projects when you drop to Free. If something about these terms doesn't work for you, email us before it becomes a problem.

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1. Who we are, and what you're agreeing to

Littview ("Littview", "we", "us") is operated by Littview Inc., a corporation constituted under the laws of Quebec, Canada, enterprise number (NEQ) [[NEQ]].

You can reach us at info@littview.com for anything to do with the company or these Terms, and at support@littview.com for help with the Service. Our postal address is on the Quebec enterprise register and is available on request.

These Terms of Service (the "Terms") are a binding agreement between you and us covering your use of the Littview website (littview.com), the Littview application (app.littview.com), and everything we provide through them (together, the "Service").

By creating an account, signing in, or using the Service, you agree to these Terms. If you're agreeing on behalf of a university, department, research group or company, you confirm you're authorised to bind that organisation, and "you" means both you and it.

Two related documents form part of this agreement: our Privacy Policy and our Refund Policy. If a conflict arises between these Terms and the Refund Policy on a refund question, the Refund Policy controls.

2. Eligibility

You must be at least 18 years old and legally able to enter a contract to use the Service. The Service is built for researchers and research teams; it is not designed for, marketed to, or intended for children.

3. Your account

• You can sign up with an email address and password, or with Sign in with Google. Our sign-in and sign-up forms use Cloudflare Turnstile to block automated abuse.
• Give us accurate information, and keep your email address current — we use it for security, billing and service notices.
• You are responsible for your account and your credentials. Don't share your password. Tell us promptly at support@littview.com if you think someone else has access.
• One account is for one person. You may invite colleagues into your projects as members; each of them needs their own account.
• We may suspend or close accounts that we reasonably believe are being used to breach these Terms (see §20).

4. What the Service does — and what it doesn't

Littview helps you run a systematic literature review end to end: importing bibliographic references (BibTeX, RIS, PubMed MEDLINE, EndNote XML), detecting and resolving duplicates, defining inclusion and exclusion criteria, assigning papers to reviewers, screening titles/abstracts and full texts, recording and resolving reviewer conflicts, annotating PDFs, extracting data into structured forms, producing PRISMA flow diagrams and evidence tables, and drafting Methods and Results report sections with AI assistance.

To be explicit about the boundaries:

• Littview is a workflow and record-keeping tool. It does not perform statistical meta-analysis, and it does not certify that your review is methodologically sound or PRISMA-compliant. Producing a PRISMA diagram in Littview is not the same as conducting a review that meets PRISMA, Cochrane, JBI or any journal's requirements.
• Methodological responsibility stays with you. Which papers are included, which criteria apply, whether a conflict was resolved correctly, whether your extracted data is accurate — these are your scholarly judgements, and they remain yours whether or not you used an AI suggestion along the way.
• Littview is not a data repository or backup service. Keep your own copies of anything you can't afford to lose. Export functions are provided (evidence table CSV, Methods and PRISMA DOCX exports), and you should use them.
• Littview does not provide medical, clinical, legal, or professional advice, and its outputs must not be used as a substitute for professional judgement in any regulated setting.

We're continuously improving the Service, and we may add, change or remove features. If we remove something material that you rely on, we'll aim to give reasonable notice (see §21).

5. Plans, limits and how they work

We offer three plans:

All prices are in US dollars and exclude any sales tax or VAT, which Paddle calculates and adds at checkout based on your location (see §6).

Limits. Every plan has limits on the number of projects you can own, the number of members you can invite per project, the number of references per project, and PDF storage per project. The current published limits are shown on our pricing page and in the app; we may change them, and if we reduce a limit in a way that affects you, §21 (notice) applies.

Three rules about limits worth stating plainly, because they surprise people:

1. Limits apply when you add, never retroactively. If you're over a limit — because you downgraded, or because we changed one — nothing is deleted, hidden, or locked. Everything you already have stays fully viewable and usable; the limit only stops you adding more of that thing.
2. The project owner's plan governs the project. Every limit and every AI call is measured against the plan and credit balance of the person who created the project — not the person clicking. So a Free user invited into a Pro owner's project can use that project's AI features (charged to the owner's credits), and a Free user cannot use AI on their own project even if their collaborator is on Pro. We do not charge per seat.
3. Members are invited, not billed. Inviting colleagues doesn't increase your price; it consumes a member slot in your plan's limit.

Fair use. The Service is intended for genuine research use. We may contact you, and if necessary apply reasonable restrictions, if usage patterns are abnormal enough to degrade the Service for others or to indicate automated abuse (see §9).

6. Billing, payment and auto-renewal

Paddle is our Merchant of Record. All purchases — subscriptions and one-time credit packs alike — are sold and processed by Paddle.com Market Ltd and its affiliates ("Paddle"), acting as an authorised reseller of Littview. This means, concretely:

• Paddle, not Littview, is the seller on your invoice and the party that charges your payment method.
• Paddle calculates, collects and remits any sales tax or VAT applicable to your purchase, based on the country and details you provide at checkout.
• Paddle issues your invoices and receipts, and your card statement will show Paddle alongside Littview.
• Your purchase is also subject to Paddle's Buyer Terms and Conditions and Paddle's Privacy Policy.
• We never see or store your full card details. Littview stores only non-sensitive billing metadata — your plan, subscription status, billing cycle and renewal date.

Auto-renewal. Paid plans renew automatically at the end of each billing period — monthly or annually, whichever you chose — at the then-current price, using your saved payment method, until you cancel. You can cancel at any time from your account page in the app (§7).

Payment failures. If a renewal payment fails, Paddle will retry it over a short recovery period, and we'll show a payment warning in the app. If payment isn't recovered, the subscription is cancelled and the account moves to Free under §7 — projects and data are not deleted.

Managing payment details and invoices. You can update your payment method and retrieve past invoices at any time through Paddle's hosted customer portal, reachable from your account page in the app.

Price changes. See §21.

7. Cancellation and downgrade

• Cancelling takes effect at the end of the billing period you've already paid for. You keep Pro — features, credits, limits — until that date. At the end of the period, the account moves to the Free plan.
• There is no automatic refund for the unused part of a period, and no mid-period proration by default. Where we do offer refunds, and how to ask for one, is set out in the Refund Policy, which is part of this agreement.
• You can resume before the period ends — if you change your mind, resuming from your account page cancels the scheduled downgrade and the subscription continues normally.
• Switching between monthly and annual is supported from your account page. Paddle prices the switch and applies proration according to its own rules; the amount is shown to you before you confirm.
• Downgrading deletes nothing. Your projects, references, PDFs, annotations, screening decisions and extracted data remain in your account and remain fully viewable and exportable. What changes is that AI features stop (they are Pro-only), automatic duplicate resolution stops, and Free's limits apply to adding new projects, members, references or files (§5, rule 1).
• If you want your data removed entirely, that's a separate request — see the Privacy Policy §10.

8. AI credits, and extra credit packs

Monthly credits. Pro includes 2,500 AI credits per calendar billing month. Credits are the unit we use to price AI work; the number of credits an AI action consumes depends on how much text it processes. Unused monthly credits do not roll over — the allowance resets to 2,500 at each refill, on monthly and annual plans alike (annual subscribers receive a monthly refill, not 30,000 up front).

Extra credit packs (top-ups). If you need more than the monthly allowance, you can buy one-time credit packs:

The rules for extra credits — please read them before buying, because they're also shown at the point of purchase:

• An active Pro subscription is required both to buy extra credits and to use them. Free accounts cannot buy them. If your subscription ends, any remaining extra credits stay in your wallet but cannot be spent until you're on Pro again.
• Your monthly allowance is always spent first. Extra credits are only consumed after the month's 2,500 credits are exhausted. Buying a pack does not change or roll over your monthly allowance.
• Extra credits expire 12 months after your most recent extra-credit purchase. You have a single extra-credits balance with a single expiry date, and buying a new pack extends the expiry of your entire remaining balance to 12 months from that new purchase. The clock runs on calendar time and does not pause — it keeps running if you downgrade, cancel, or simply don't use the Service. We show your balance and its expiry date in the app, and we send an in-app notification and an email 30 days before an unspent balance expires.
• Credits have no cash value, are not money, and are not transferable between accounts, users, or projects. They can only be used for AI features inside Littview.
• Refunds for extra credit packs are governed by the Refund Policy.

9. Acceptable use

You agree not to:

• Upload, store or process content you don't have the right to upload (see §11), or use the Service to infringe anyone's intellectual property or privacy.
• Upload material that is unlawful, malicious (malware, exploits), or that you are contractually or legally barred from disclosing to a third-party processor — including, unless you have a specific written agreement with us, identifiable patient records, clinical trial participant data, or other special-category personal data. Systematic reviews normally operate on published literature; if your use case involves personal or sensitive data, contact us first.
• Attempt to access another user's account, project or data; probe, scan or test the security of the Service except under a written authorisation from us; bypass or attempt to bypass plan limits, credit accounting, AI gating, or authentication.
• Scrape, crawl or bulk-extract the Service, or use it via automated means beyond the interfaces we provide, in ways that place an unreasonable load on our infrastructure.
• Resell, sublicense, or provide the Service to third parties as a service of your own, or share a single account among multiple people to avoid member limits.
• Use the AI features to generate content that you then present as human-authored where a journal, funder, institution or publisher requires disclosure — see §12.
• Reverse-engineer, decompile, or attempt to derive the source code of the Service, except to the extent that restriction is unenforceable under applicable law.

Security research is welcome under coordinated disclosure: email support@littview.com before testing, don't access other users' data, and give us a reasonable time to fix what you find.

10. Your content, and the licence you give us

You own your content. Everything you upload or create in Littview — reference libraries, PDFs, annotations and highlights, criteria, screening decisions, extracted data, notes, project settings, and the report text generated from them ("Your Content") — remains yours. We claim no ownership of it.

To run the Service, we need permission to handle it. You grant us a non-exclusive, worldwide, royalty-free licence to host, store, copy, transmit, display, adapt (only in the technical sense: reformatting, indexing, generating thumbnails and extracted text) and process Your Content, and to share it with the sub-processors listed in our Privacy Policy, solely to provide, secure, support and improve the Service for you. This licence exists only for as long as we host Your Content, and ends when you delete it or close your account — except for backups, which age out on our normal backup cycle.

What we do not do with Your Content:

• We do not sell it.
• We do not use it to advertise to you or anyone else.
• We do not use Your Content to train AI models, and our AI provider does not use API-submitted content to train its models (see §12 and Privacy Policy §6).

Collaboration. When you invite someone into a project, you're authorising them to see and, depending on their role, modify the content in that project. Project owners can see project activity — including which member made which screening decision and which member consumed AI credits — because they're responsible for the project and pay for its usage.

Aggregate statistics. We may compute and use anonymous, aggregated statistics about how the Service is used (for example, "the median project screens N papers per week"). These never identify you, your organisation, or your review, and are never derived in a way that could expose the substance of Your Content.

11. Copyright in what you upload — read this one

Journal articles and other academic PDFs are usually copyrighted, and access is usually governed by your library's or institution's licence with the publisher.

You are solely responsible for having the right to upload every file and every reference you put into Littview, and for using them only in ways your licence or applicable law (for example, fair dealing / fair use, or a text-and-data-mining exception) permits. Littview is a private workspace for your own review; it is not a repository, a sharing platform, or a way to distribute papers beyond the project members you invite. You warrant that you have the rights described in this section, and §19 (indemnity) applies if that turns out not to be true.

Notice and takedown. If you're a rights holder and believe content stored in Littview infringes your rights, email support@littview.com with: your contact details, identification of the work, identification of the material (enough for us to locate it), a statement of your good-faith belief that the use isn't authorised, and a statement that your notice is accurate. We will review and, where appropriate, remove or disable access to the material and notify the account holder. Note that content in Littview sits inside private, access- controlled projects; it is not publicly accessible.

12. AI features — what they are and what they are not

Littview's AI features (screening suggestions, data extraction, conflict resolution suggestions, and Methods / Results report drafting) are powered by a third-party large-language-model provider, OpenAI. When you invoke an AI feature, we send that provider the material it needs: paper titles and abstracts, the extracted text of PDFs when you use a full-text feature, your project's inclusion/exclusion criteria and extraction template, and — for conflict resolution — reviewers' votes and notes. Details are in Privacy Policy §6.

The rules that matter:

1. AI output is assistive, and it can be wrong. Language models can produce confident, plausible, and incorrect results: a misread abstract, an extracted value that isn't in the paper, a citation or claim that doesn't hold. You must review every AI output before relying on it. Littview deliberately presents AI results as suggestions you accept, edit, or reject — never as automatic decisions.
2. The decision stays yours. No AI feature in Littview finalises a screening decision, resolves a conflict, or submits an extraction on its own. The record in your review is the one a human recorded.
3. AI output is not professional advice — not medical, clinical, legal, or regulatory advice — and must not be used as one.
4. You are the author of your manuscript. Drafted Methods and Results text is a starting point that you must verify, edit and stand behind. Many journals, publishers, funders and institutions require disclosure of AI assistance in preparing a manuscript, and some restrict it. Complying with those rules is your responsibility, and we recommend disclosing your use of AI assistance.
5. AI features consume credits (§8), including when the output isn't useful to you — credits pay for the processing, not for a guaranteed result.
6. Availability may vary. AI features depend on a third-party API. Outages, rate limits, model changes and provider policy changes are outside our control; we may change the underlying model, and we may temporarily limit AI throughput to keep the Service stable.
7. We do not warrant the accuracy, completeness, reproducibility or fitness for any purpose of AI output. §18 and §19 apply to it in full.

13. Third-party services

The Service depends on third parties, each listed with its purpose in our Privacy Policy §7: Supabase (database, authentication, file storage), OpenAI (AI processing), Paddle (payments as Merchant of Record), Amazon Web Services / SES (transactional email), Cloudflare (hosting, CDN and bot protection), Google (optional OAuth sign-in), and PostHog (product analytics and error diagnostics, only with your consent — Privacy Policy §13).

You may also choose to connect optional integrations — for example, importing a bibliography from Zotero. When you do, you're using that third party under its own terms, and we're not responsible for it. If a third-party service changes or shuts down, the corresponding Littview feature may change or stop.

14. Our intellectual property

The Littview software, interface, design, documentation, brand, logo and name are owned by us or our licensors and are protected by intellectual property law. These Terms grant you a limited, non-exclusive, non-transferable, non-sublicensable right to access and use the Service for your own research work, for as long as your account is in good standing. Nothing here transfers any ownership to you. You may not use our name or logo to imply endorsement without our written permission.

15. Feedback

If you send us ideas, suggestions or feature requests, we may use them freely, without obligation or compensation to you. Don't send us anything confidential as feedback.

16. Availability, changes and beta features

We work to keep the Service available and fast, but we don't promise uninterrupted or error-free operation. Maintenance, third-party outages (Supabase, Cloudflare, OpenAI, Paddle), and network problems happen. We may suspend access temporarily for maintenance or security, and we'll try to give notice where the suspension is planned.

Features marked beta, preview or experimental are provided as-is, may change or disappear, and are excluded from any commitment we make elsewhere.

17. Disclaimer of warranties

To the maximum extent permitted by law, the Service is provided "as is" and "as available", and we disclaim all warranties, express or implied, including implied warranties of merchantability, fitness for a particular purpose, accuracy, and non-infringement.

We do not warrant that the Service will meet your requirements, that it will be uninterrupted, secure or error-free, that defects will be corrected, or that any AI output, duplicate detection, similarity matching, or automated suggestion will be accurate or complete.

Nothing in these Terms excludes or limits any liability that cannot lawfully be excluded or limited — including, where applicable, liability for death or personal injury caused by negligence, for fraud, and any non-excludable rights you have as a consumer under Quebec's Consumer Protection Act or under the mandatory consumer law of your own country of residence.

18. Limitation of liability

To the maximum extent permitted by law:

• Neither party is liable for indirect, incidental, special, consequential or punitive damages, or for loss of profits, revenue, goodwill, or anticipated savings.
• We are not liable for loss or corruption of data to the extent you could have avoided it by keeping your own copies — please export your work regularly (§4).
• Our total aggregate liability arising out of or relating to the Service or these Terms, whether in contract, tort (including negligence) or otherwise, is limited to the greater of (a) the total amount you paid us for the Service in the twelve (12) months immediately before the event giving rise to the claim, and (b) US$100.
• We are not liable for the scholarly, editorial or regulatory consequences of your review — including a retraction, rejection, correction, funder or institutional finding, or any decision made on the basis of a review conducted using Littview. §4 and §12 explain why: those judgements are yours.

If you're a consumer, this section doesn't take away rights the law gives you. Quebec's Consumer Protection Act, and consumer law in the EU and UK, limit how far a merchant may exclude liability for its own acts. Where a limit above isn't permitted against you, it simply doesn't apply to you, and the rest of this section still stands.

19. Indemnity

You agree to indemnify and hold us harmless from claims, damages, liabilities and reasonable costs (including legal fees) arising from: (a) content you upload or process through the Service, including any claim that it infringes copyright or another right (§11); (b) your breach of these Terms or of applicable law; (c) your use of AI output, including any scholarly, publication or regulatory consequence of it; and (d) personal data you put into the Service without a lawful basis.

We'll notify you of any such claim, and you may control the defence with counsel reasonably acceptable to us — but you may not settle in a way that imposes an obligation or admission on us without our consent.

20. Suspension and termination

By you. Cancel your subscription any time from your account page (§7), or ask us to delete your account entirely (Privacy Policy §10).

By us. We may suspend or terminate your access if: you materially breach these Terms (especially §9 or §11); payment fails and isn't recovered; your use poses a security, legal or operational risk to the Service or other users; or we're required to by law. Except where a breach is serious, illegal, or ongoing harm is being caused, we'll give you notice and a reasonable chance to fix the problem first.

What happens to your data. If we terminate your account for breach, or you close it, we'll normally give you 30 days to export your content before deletion, unless a legal obligation or an ongoing security or legal issue prevents that. If we discontinue the Service entirely, we'll give at least 90 days' notice, keep exports working through that window, and refund the unused prepaid portion of any subscription.

21. Changes to these Terms, to the Service, and to prices

• Terms. We may update these Terms. For material changes we'll give at least 30 days' notice by email and/or an in-app notice before they take effect, and update the "Last updated" date. Continuing to use the Service after they take effect means you accept them; if you don't, cancel before the effective date and the Refund Policy applies.
• Prices. We may change prices. A price change never applies to a period you've already paid for. For subscription renewals, we'll give at least 30 days' notice before the new price applies, so you can cancel first. Introductory or promotional pricing applies only for the stated period.
• Plan limits and credit allowances. We may adjust them. If a change reduces what you get on a plan you're paying for, the same notice applies, and §5 rule 1 still holds: nothing already created is deleted.
• You can always say no. If you don't accept a change to these Terms, to the price, or to what a plan includes, you may cancel before it takes effect at no cost, and it never applies to a period you've already paid for.

22. Governing law and disputes

These Terms are governed by the laws of the Province of Quebec and the federal laws of Canada applicable there, without regard to conflict-of-laws rules, and the courts of the Province of Quebec have jurisdiction — except that if you're a consumer, you keep the protection of the mandatory laws of your country of residence and may bring proceedings there where the law gives you that right.

Talk to us first. Before starting formal proceedings, please email support@littview.com and give us 30 days to resolve it. Most problems are faster to fix than to litigate.

23. General

• Entire agreement. These Terms, the Privacy Policy and the Refund Policy are the whole agreement between us about the Service, and replace anything said before.
• Severability. If a provision is unenforceable, the rest stays in force.
• No waiver. Not enforcing a provision once doesn't waive it.
• Assignment. You may not assign these Terms without our consent. We may assign them to an affiliate or in connection with a merger, acquisition or sale of assets, on notice to you.
• Force majeure. Neither party is liable for failures caused by events beyond its reasonable control.
• Notices. We'll send notices to your account email address; send yours to support@littview.com.
• No third-party beneficiaries, except that our sub-processors and affiliates may rely on §17, §18 and §19.

24. Contact

Littview Inc. — a Quebec, Canada corporation Company and legal enquiries: info@littview.com Support, billing and refunds: support@littview.com Postal address available on request.