Terms & Conditions

1.Agreement to these Terms

Write&Cite is a writing and citation platform for students, teachers and researchers. These Terms apply to the Write&Cite website, the writing editor, the Hub, class and teacher tools, citation and source features, exports, and every other service we make available under the Write&Cite name (together, the “Platform”).

By creating an account, signing in, or otherwise using any part of the Platform, you confirm that you have read and accept these Terms. If you do not accept them, you must not use the Platform.

2.Who may use the Platform

• You must be capable of entering into a binding contract, or must have the consent and supervision of a parent or legal guardian who is.
• Student accounts require a parent or guardian to confirm consent by email. Until that confirmation is received, the account remains limited and cannot be used for writing or class work.
• Teacher accounts are issued by invitation only. Attempting to obtain teacher access, class access, or any other elevated role without a valid invitation is a breach of these Terms.
• The details you provide at signup and in your profile, including your name, your institution and your parent or guardian contact details, must be accurate and kept up to date.
• We may refuse, limit, suspend or withdraw access where we reasonably believe these Terms have been breached, or where required by law.

3.Your account

An account is personal to one individual. You may not share your account, your password, or any invitation or class link issued to you, and you may not use another person's account.

You are responsible for everything that happens under your account. Keep your password confidential, choose a password you do not reuse elsewhere, and tell us at hello@alekhni.com as soon as you believe your account has been accessed without your permission. We may ask you to verify your email address, or to verify it again, before restoring access.

4.Parents and guardians

Where a parent or guardian gives consent for a student account, that parent or guardian accepts these Terms on the student's behalf and agrees to supervise the student's use of the Platform.

Consent may be withdrawn at any time by writing to us. When consent is withdrawn we will close or suspend the account, and the student's work will be handled as set out in the clause on suspension and termination below.

5.Classes, teachers and visibility of work

Write&Cite is built so that a teacher can see how a piece of work came together, not only the finished file. If you join a class, or share a document with a teacher, that teacher may view the document, its draft and version history, the sources and citations attached to it, and related activity such as progress and submission status.

This visibility is a core function of the Platform. Do not place information in a document that you do not want the teacher of that class to see, and do not use documents to store personal, confidential or sensitive information unrelated to the work.

Teachers may use student work, drafts and activity only for teaching, feedback, assessment and academic integrity purposes, and must comply with their institution's policies and with applicable law when doing so.

6.Your right to use the Platform

Subject to these Terms, we grant you a limited, personal, non-exclusive, non-transferable and revocable right to use the Platform for your own academic writing, teaching or research.

This right does not allow you to resell the Platform, sublicense it, use it to provide a service to third parties, or make it available to anyone outside your own account.

7.Acceptable use

You must not:

• use the Platform in breach of any law, or to store, send or publish unlawful, infringing, defamatory or harmful material;
• upload malware, or upload files or content designed to disrupt the Platform or any user of it;
• access or attempt to access another user's account, documents, class or data;
• probe, scan or test the security of the Platform, circumvent authentication, rate limits or access controls, or use the Platform after access has been withdrawn;
• scrape, crawl, harvest or bulk-download content or data from the Platform, or access it by automated means other than the features we provide;
• copy, modify, decompile, disassemble or reverse engineer any part of the Platform, or attempt to derive its source code;
• impersonate another person, misrepresent your role, institution or affiliation, or forge, sell or share invitations;
• upload another person's personal information without a lawful basis for doing so;
• harass, threaten, bully or abuse any other user, including through document content, comments or class activity;
• manipulate progress features such as levels, points, streaks or class statistics, including by generating artificial activity or documents;
• place an unreasonable load on the Platform, or interfere with its normal operation for others.

8.Academic integrity

Write&Cite is a tool for doing your own work. You must not use it to present another person's work as your own, to fabricate sources, quotations or data, or to help anyone else do either of those things.

You remain responsible for complying with the rules of your school, college, university or examining body, including its rules on collaboration, referencing, permitted tools and submission. Nothing on the Platform overrides those rules, and using the Platform does not mean a piece of work satisfies them.

We may investigate credible reports of misuse and may restrict or close accounts involved.

9.Your content

“Your Content” means everything you create, upload or store on the Platform, including documents, drafts, versions, notes, images, uploaded files, sources and citation records.

You keep ownership of Your Content. We do not claim ownership of your writing or your research. You grant us a worldwide, royalty-free, non-exclusive licence to host, store, copy, transmit, render, back up and display Your Content for the sole purposes of operating, securing, supporting and maintaining the Platform and making Your Content available to you and to the people you share it with, such as the teacher of a class you join.

This licence exists only so that the Platform can function. It ends when you delete the content or your account, except for copies held in routine backups for a limited period and copies that others legitimately retained while they had access, such as a document a teacher exported.

You confirm that you hold the rights needed for everything you upload, including any images, extracts or source material. We do not routinely monitor Your Content, but we may remove content that breaches these Terms or the law, or that we are required to remove.

Please keep your own copies of work that matters to you. The Platform provides document export, and you should use it for anything you need to retain. We do not act as an archive of record for your work.

10.Sources, citations and third-party services

The Platform connects to third-party services, including reference managers such as Zotero and public metadata sources used for identifier and DOI lookups. Those services are operated by others, are governed by their own terms, and may change, fail or become unavailable. We are not responsible for them or for the accuracy of the data they return.

Where you connect an external library or account, you authorise us to access the data that connection exposes, only to provide the features you have asked for. You can end that access at any time by disconnecting the service.

Citations, in-text references and bibliographies are generated automatically from the metadata available for a source and from the style you select. Metadata is frequently incomplete or wrong at source. Check every citation before you submit work. Responsibility for the accuracy of references in your final document is yours.

11.Exports and file formats

Exported files are produced on a best-effort basis. Layout, pagination, fonts and spacing may differ between the Platform and other word processors, and between versions of those word processors. Settings that change how a document is displayed on screen do not change the exported document.

Always review an exported file before submitting or sharing it.

12.Availability and changes to the Platform

We work to keep the Platform available, but we do not guarantee uninterrupted or error-free access. Access may be suspended for maintenance, updates, security work, or reasons outside our control.

We may add, change, restrict or remove features at any time. Some features may be offered as previews or beta features; these are provided as-is, may behave unpredictably, and may be withdrawn. Where a change materially and adversely affects how you use the Platform, we will give reasonable notice where it is practical to do so.

13.Fees

The features made available to your account are currently provided free of charge. We may introduce paid plans or paid features in future. If we do, the price and the payment terms will be shown to you before any charge applies, and you will be able to decline. Any charges are exclusive of taxes unless stated otherwise.

14.Our intellectual property

The Platform itself, including its software, source code, interface design, page and document templates, layouts, graphics, icons, illustrations and written material we provide, belongs to Alekhni Technologies Private Limited or to our licensors, and is protected by intellectual property law.

Nothing in these Terms transfers any of those rights to you. You may not copy, reproduce, modify, distribute, sell, lease or create derivative works from any part of the Platform, and you may not remove or obscure any proprietary notice.

15.Feedback

If you send us suggestions, feature requests, bug reports or other feedback, you agree that we may use it without restriction, obligation or payment to you. Please do not send us information you consider confidential.

16.Privacy and data

To run the Platform we collect and process personal information, including your account and profile details, parent or guardian contact details for student accounts, the content you create, and information about how the Platform is used. We use it to provide and secure the service, to support you, and to meet our legal obligations.

We do not sell Your Content or your personal information. If you have a question about your data, or want to access, correct or delete it, write to us at hello@alekhni.com.

17.Suspension and termination

You may stop using the Platform at any time, and you may ask us to close your account and delete your data by writing to us.

We may suspend or terminate access, in whole or in part, if you breach these Terms, if your use creates a risk to the Platform or to other users, if a parent or guardian withdraws consent, if we are required to do so by law, or if an account remains inactive for an extended period. Where it is reasonable and lawful to do so, we will give notice and an opportunity to export your work first.

When an account ends, your right to use the Platform ends immediately, and Your Content may be deleted after a reasonable period. Copies legitimately retained by others, such as work already submitted to or exported by a teacher, are not affected. Clauses that by their nature should survive termination, including those on your content, our intellectual property, disclaimers, liability, indemnity and governing law, continue to apply.

18.Disclaimers

To the fullest extent permitted by law, the Platform is provided “as is” and “as available”, without warranties of any kind, whether express or implied, including any implied warranties of merchantability, fitness for a particular purpose and non-infringement.

We do not warrant that the Platform will be free of errors or interruptions, that citations, exports, saved versions or progress features will be complete or accurate, or that using the Platform will satisfy the requirements of any institution, course or examining body. The Platform is an educational writing tool and is not professional, academic or legal advice.

19.Limitation of liability

To the fullest extent permitted by law, we will not be liable for any indirect, incidental, special, consequential or exemplary loss, or for any loss of work, data, marks or grades, academic opportunity, profits, goodwill or reputation, arising out of or in connection with your use of the Platform.

Our total aggregate liability arising out of or in connection with these Terms or the Platform will not exceed the greater of the amounts you paid us for the Platform in the twelve months before the event giving rise to the claim, or INR 1,000.

Nothing in these Terms limits or excludes any liability that cannot be limited or excluded under applicable law.

20.Indemnity

You agree to indemnify and hold harmless Alekhni Technologies Private Limited, its directors, employees and agents against claims, damages, losses and reasonable costs arising from Your Content, from your use of the Platform, or from your breach of these Terms or of any law. Where the account holder is a minor, this obligation rests with the consenting parent or guardian.

21.Changes to these Terms

We may update these Terms from time to time, for example when features change or when the law requires it. The current version will always be published on this page with the date it was last updated. Where a change is material, we will give reasonable notice by email or within the Platform before it takes effect.

Continuing to use the Platform after an updated version takes effect means you accept it. If you do not accept it, you should stop using the Platform and close your account.

22.Governing law and jurisdiction

These Terms and any dispute arising out of them or out of your use of the Platform are governed by the laws of India. The courts of India have exclusive jurisdiction, subject to any mandatory rights you have under the law of your place of residence.

Before starting formal proceedings, please contact us so that we can try to resolve the matter directly.

23.Contact and grievances

Alekhni Technologies Private Limited can be reached at hello@alekhni.com, or through the contact page.

If you have a complaint about content on the Platform, about another user's conduct, or about how your information has been handled, write to the same address with enough detail for us to identify the issue. We will acknowledge your complaint and work to resolve it within the timelines required by applicable law.

24.General

• These Terms are the entire agreement between you and us regarding the Platform, and replace any earlier terms for it.
• If any provision is held to be invalid or unenforceable, the rest remains in force.
• A delay in enforcing any right is not a waiver of it.
• You may not assign or transfer your rights under these Terms. We may assign ours to an affiliate, or in connection with a merger, acquisition or transfer of the business.
• We are not liable for failure or delay caused by events outside our reasonable control.
• These Terms do not create any partnership, agency or employment relationship between you and us.
• Headings are for convenience only and do not affect interpretation.