Terms of Service

1. What Benchpro provides

Benchpro is available to scientists and organisations worldwide. It helps scientists build evidence-backed professional profiles by linking scientific capabilities and contributions to scholarly work and by enabling review or verification by co-authors. It also helps organisations and other users discover scientific talent.

Benchpro may use public scholarly and professional information, information supplied by users, automated processing, and human review to operate these features.

The Service is currently provided free of charge, and Benchpro does not collect payments.

2. Eligibility and accounts

You must be at least 18 years old or have reached the age of majority in your jurisdiction, whichever is higher, and be legally able to agree to these Terms.

You must provide accurate account information, keep it reasonably current, and protect your authentication credentials. You are responsible for activity performed through your account unless you promptly notify us of suspected unauthorised access.

Do not impersonate another person or create an account using information you are not entitled to use.

3. Scientific profiles and public scholarly information

Benchpro may create, enrich, or display profiles using lawfully available scholarly and professional information, such as names, affiliations, ORCID identifiers, publication metadata, authorship information, and information associated with published research.

Profiles and discovery or search results may be public, including when they draw on public information about people who have not registered.

The presence of information in a profile does not mean that the person has registered for or endorsed Benchpro. Where the Service identifies a profile as claimed, reviewed, or verified, that status has only the meaning described by the relevant Benchpro workflow.

If information about you is inaccurate, misattributed, or should be reviewed, contact miguel@benchpro.ai or use any correction or reporting mechanism available in the Service. Requests involving personal data are handled as described in our Privacy Policy.

4. Claims, reviews and verification

You may only claim scientific capabilities, contributions, affiliations, or other credentials that you honestly and reasonably believe are accurate and supported by the cited evidence.

When providing a co-author review or verification response, you must respond in good faith and must not knowingly provide false, misleading, retaliatory, or manipulative information.

A Benchpro verification status records the result of the applicable product workflow. It is not an independent audit, certification, professional licence, or guarantee by Benchpro. Verification does not establish that information is complete, current, or suitable for a particular decision.

We may correct labels, remove disputed material, request supporting information, or suspend a verification status when we reasonably believe it is inaccurate, misleading, manipulated, or inconsistent with the Service’s rules.

5. AI-assisted features

Benchpro uses artificial intelligence and other automated methods to assist with publication ingestion, information extraction, classification, profile generation, and search.

Automated outputs may be incomplete, inaccurate, or incorrectly attributed. They do not independently verify a scientific capability or contribution. You must review information before submitting, confirming, or materially relying on it, and should report significant errors to us.

6. Professional and high-impact decisions

Profiles, classifications, claims, review responses, verification records, and search results are provided for professional discovery and informational purposes.

Do not use Benchpro as the sole basis for employment, funding, admission, credentialing, clinical, laboratory-safety, or other high-impact decisions. Users and organisations remain responsible for appropriate interviews, reference checks, credential checks, regulatory checks, and other due diligence.

Benchpro is not an employer, recruitment agency, university, research institution, professional regulator, or credentialing body, and does not guarantee employment, candidates, collaborations, or outcomes.

7. Your content

“Your Content” means information or material you deliberately submit to the Service, such as profile text, capability claims, contribution information, review responses, and feedback. It does not include information that Benchpro independently obtains from public or third-party sources.

You retain any rights you hold in Your Content. You give Benchpro a non-exclusive, worldwide, royalty-free licence to host, store, reproduce, process, adapt for technical presentation, and display Your Content only as reasonably necessary to:

• provide, secure, maintain, and improve the Service;
• display profiles, claims, and verification information according to your actions and the Service’s settings;
• investigate errors, misuse, and disputes; and
• comply with law.

This licence lasts while Your Content is used by the Service and for a reasonable period afterwards for backups, legal compliance, security, and dispute resolution. Public information or information retained on another lawful basis may remain available as explained in the Privacy Policy.

You confirm that you have the rights and permissions necessary to submit Your Content and allow these uses. Do not submit confidential information, unpublished research, trade secrets, personal data about others, or material subject to restrictions unless you are authorised to do so and its use is appropriate for the Service.

Feedback and suggestions may be used by Benchpro without payment or obligation, but you do not transfer ownership of unrelated materials or pre-existing intellectual property merely by providing feedback.

8. Acceptable use

You must not:

• misrepresent scientific contributions, capabilities, credentials, affiliations, or verification outcomes;
• impersonate another person, manipulate reviews, coordinate fraudulent verification, or create deceptive accounts;
• harass, threaten, discriminate against, or defame another person;
• upload unlawful, infringing, malicious, or intentionally misleading material;
• expose another person’s confidential or personal information without authority;
• attempt to bypass authentication, access controls, rate limits, or security measures;
• introduce malware or interfere with the operation of the Service;
• scrape, harvest, or systematically extract data except through functionality we provide, with our written permission, or where applicable law does not allow such restriction;
• use the Service to send spam or unsolicited marketing;
• sell or transfer your account or falsely present Benchpro information as an independent certification; or
• use the Service unlawfully or to facilitate unlawful conduct.

Reasonable use of ordinary browsers, accessibility tools, and authorised integrations is permitted. Search-engine indexing is permitted only to the extent enabled by Benchpro’s technical configuration.

9. Benchpro intellectual property

The Service’s software, design, branding, and original content are owned by or licensed to Benchpro and are protected by applicable intellectual-property laws.

Subject to these Terms, we give you a limited, non-exclusive, non-transferable, and revocable right to use the Service for its intended purposes. These Terms do not transfer ownership of Benchpro’s technology, branding, or content to you.

Third-party scholarly records, publication content, names, identifiers, and other third-party materials remain subject to the rights of their respective owners and applicable source terms.

10. Third-party services and content

The Service may use or link to third-party services and data sources, including scholarly databases and identity providers. Their content, availability, and practices are outside our control and may be governed by their own terms and privacy notices.

A link, imported record, or search result does not necessarily mean that Benchpro endorses the third party or guarantees the accuracy of its information.

11. Moderation, suspension and termination

We may investigate suspected misuse and may restrict content, verification status, or account access when reasonably necessary to protect users, the integrity or security of the Service, third-party rights, or compliance with law.

We may suspend or terminate an account for a material or repeated breach of these Terms. Where reasonably possible, we will give notice and an opportunity to address the issue, unless immediate action is justified by security, legal, fraud, abuse, or integrity concerns.

You may stop using the Service and request account deletion as described in the Privacy Policy. Provisions that by their nature should survive termination—including intellectual-property protections, responsibility for prior conduct, disclaimers, and dispute provisions—will continue to apply.

12. Availability and changes to the Service

We may change, improve, suspend, or discontinue features. We do not guarantee uninterrupted or error-free availability, and the Service may occasionally be unavailable for maintenance, security incidents, or circumstances beyond our reasonable control.

If a change materially affects registered users, we will provide reasonable notice where practical.

13. Privacy

Our Privacy Policy explains how we process personal data, including information derived from public scholarly sources, service providers, security logs, international transfers, and your data-protection rights.

The lawful bases and safeguards for personal-data processing are determined under applicable data-protection law; they are not created merely by accepting these Terms.

The only cookie Benchpro currently uses is the strictly necessary _benchpro_key session and security cookie.

14. Disclaimers

To the extent permitted by law, the Service is provided on an “as available” basis. Scientific and professional information may contain errors, omissions, outdated information, or incorrect attribution, including errors introduced by third-party sources or automated processing.

We do not guarantee the accuracy, completeness, fitness for a particular purpose, or outcome of profiles, classifications, verification records, or search results.

Nothing in these Terms excludes warranties, remedies, or other mandatory rights that cannot lawfully be excluded.

15. Liability

Nothing in these Terms excludes or limits liability where doing so would be unlawful, including liability for fraud, wilful misconduct, or any mandatory rights available to consumers.

To the extent permitted by law, Benchpro is not liable for indirect or consequential losses, lost opportunities, or decisions made by relying solely on information in the Service.

If liability may lawfully be limited, Benchpro’s aggregate liability arising from the free Service will not exceed €100. This limit does not apply where prohibited by applicable law.

You remain responsible for your unlawful conduct, your breach of these Terms, and content you submit without the necessary rights.

16. Changes to these Terms

We may update these Terms to reflect changes to the Service, law, security requirements, or our practices. We will update the effective date and, for material changes affecting registered users, provide reasonable advance notice by email or within the Service where practical.

Your continued use after the revised Terms take effect means that the revised Terms apply from that date. If you do not agree to a material change, you may stop using the Service and request deletion of your account.

17. Governing law and disputes

These Terms are governed by Portuguese law.

The courts of Portugal have jurisdiction, without depriving consumers resident in the European Economic Area or another jurisdiction of any mandatory protections or rights to bring proceedings that applicable law grants them.

Before starting formal proceedings, please contact miguel@benchpro.ai so we can try to resolve the issue informally.

18. General provisions

If a provision of these Terms is found unenforceable, the remaining provisions will continue in effect. A failure to enforce a provision is not a waiver of it.

You may not transfer your account or your rights under these Terms without our consent. We may transfer the operation of the Service and these Terms to a successor operator, provided that this does not reduce mandatory rights and that users receive appropriate notice.

These Terms, together with documents expressly referenced in them, form the agreement governing use of the Service.

19. Contact

Questions, complaints, and notices about these Terms may be sent to:
Miguel Laginha, trading as Benchpro
miguel@benchpro.ai

Full operator information is available in the Legal Notice.