Terms of use

1. Who you are dealing with

Papertrek is operated by Dr. Marian Sauter, Ulm, Germany, acting as a private trader; the full details are in the imprint. The language of this agreement is English. You can write to us in German or English at contact@papertrek.app.

2. The beta

Papertrek is free. Every feature is open, no card is asked for, and it is meant to stay free for anyone who cannot or does not want to pay. Tips through the support page are voluntary and buy nothing. Should the price ever have to change, you would be told months ahead, and nothing you have entered would be lost.

Papertrek is in beta until v1.0, planned for January 2027. Until then, and in truth for a one-person service after that too, no particular availability, speed or lifetime is promised. We back the database up daily and aim to keep the service running, but there can be outages, and things can change.

3. Your account

One person, one account. You are responsible for what happens under your login and for keeping your password to yourself. You can delete your account yourself at any time in Settings; deletion is immediate and permanent, and encrypted backups follow within 90 days (details on the privacy page).

4. Your manuscripts and what you share

What you enter stays yours. We claim no rights in your manuscripts, titles, abstracts or notes beyond what is needed to show them back to you and to the people you choose. Three things make content visible to others, and each is your decision and reversible: your public publication list and its embed widget, a supervisor link to your board, and sharing a manuscript with its co-authors. Please only share what you are entitled to share, and only with the people it concerns.

5. Sharing with co-authors

When you invite co-authors to a manuscript, you stay in control: you choose who gets the link, you see who has joined, and you can remove anyone, replace the link or stop sharing at any time. Members see a fixed, read-only part of the manuscript (its title, type, stage, abstract, authors and roles, submissions and decisions, automatic revision deadlines and stage history) and never your notes, files, targets or manually created deadlines. Their access ends when you remove them, replace the link, stop sharing, delete the manuscript or your account, or when they leave; what someone has already seen cannot be unseen. Members have no claim that a shared manuscript stays available or current. As the person inviting, you send the link yourself, only to authors of that manuscript, and never post it publicly. Papertrek sends no invitations and writes only to people who have an account.

6. Content and reports

Do not use Papertrek to store or show content that is unlawful or that violates someone else’s rights. Anyone who believes content on Papertrek is illegal can tell us through Report content, with or without giving a name or address. A person reads every report. If we restrict content, we tell the account holder what we restricted and why, and how to object; a reporter who left an address learns our decision too. The courts remain open to everyone.

7. Ending the agreement

You can end it at any time by deleting your account. We end it only for a reason, for example repeated unlawful content or abuse of the service, and only after telling you the reason and giving you a chance to respond, unless the law requires us to act at once. An ended account can export its data first (section 10).

8. Liability

We are liable without limit for intent and gross negligence, and for injury to life, body or health. For slight negligence we are liable only for the breach of duties on which the agreement depends, and then only for the typical, foreseeable damage. Statutory liability that cannot be excluded is unaffected. Papertrek is a planning aid: deadlines, reminders and imported metadata are provided as entered or as the sources deliver them, and checking them against the journal remains yours.

9. Changes to these terms

We may change these terms for a good reason, for example a change in the law, in the features or in how the service is run. You will be told in the app and, if we have your address, by email, at least four weeks before a change takes effect, with what changes and why. Your silence is never counts as acceptance: a change applies to you only once you have agreed to it, and if you do not want it you can end the agreement at any time without cost.

10. Leaving and taking your data

You can leave at any time and take everything with you. Settings offers a complete export in open formats: your manuscripts with authors, roles, targets, submissions, decisions and deadlines, your journals and notes, tags, the history of each manuscript, your notification devices and dashboard links, and your account record, as JSON, plus BibTeX for the bibliography. The export is free, needs no request to us, and stays available for as long as your account exists. There is no notice period and no fee for switching.

11. Governing law

German law applies. If you are a consumer, the mandatory protections of the law of the country where you live are not taken from you by this choice.

12. How this agreement comes about

You enter it by creating an account: you fill in the form, can correct your entries until you press the button, and confirm your email address. The sentence above the button states that you accept these terms. We do not store the signed agreement as a document; this page is the text, and you can save or print it. No codes of conduct apply.