Research, Innovation, Technologies - Hub for Academics

General Statement

YOU and Research, Innovation and Technologies – Hub for Academics (abbrev. RITHA) and RITHA Publishing House as business units of SCIRES WEB LTD (“RITHA” “WE”, “US”, and “OUR”) agree that your access to and use of the website located at www.ritha.eu and the services offered via the website by RITHA (the SERVICES) is subject to your agreement to these TERMS of SERVICE, which will become a binding agreement between YOU and RITHA (the AGREEMENT). RITHA is willing to allow you access to the website and provide the SERVICES only upon the condition that you accept all of the terms of this AGREEMENT.

Please read these terms carefully. Your continued use or browsing of the website and services or your registration of an account shall constitute consent to these Terms of Service. If you do not agree, do not proceed with account creation or the use of the web site and services.

Account Registration

The SERVICES are available only to persons who can form legally binding contracts under applicable law. Without limiting the foregoing, the SERVICES are not available to individuals under the age of 18. If you are under 18, then you are not permitted to use the SERVICES.

In order to receive the SERVICES, you must pay in advance the applicable fee or hold an active subscription unless WE agree that you may make payment pursuant to another payment plan. Such arrangements can be made by contacting office@ritha.eu. WE will display the current price during service selection, including subscription registration.

You must SUBMIT in order to use the SERVICES. YOU agree that all information provided by you in connection with the submission and sign-up process (“Submission Information”) will be true, accurate, current, and complete and that you will promptly update your Submission Information as necessary such that it is, at all times, true, accurate, complete, and current. YOU are responsible for maintaining the security of your account, passwords, and files, and for all uses of your account and of the Services in your name. WE reserve the right to refuse submission of, or cancel, accounts at any time and for any reason, as RITHA deems appropriate for its business core. Upon termination of your submission as a “user”, you will no longer be allowed access to the website or the Services offered through the website.

WE also reserve the right to modify, suspend or discontinue the SERVICE with or without notice at any time and without any liability to you. WE may periodically update the core functionality of the software with the goal of improving performance or user experience. WE are not obligated to make past versions of the services available and do not guarantee that the features or outputs will remain consistent from version to version.

WE may use all Submission Information, subject to compliance with our Privacy Notice. This Agreement includes terms and conditions set forth in the Privacy Notice. By indicating your agreement to this AGREEMENT, YOU are consenting to have your personal data used by US as set forth in the Privacy Notice.

If YOU are using the SERVICES under an institutional contract between your business through RITHA as business unit, the specific provisions of that contract supersede this agreement where there is any conflict. For the avoidance of doubt, nothing in these Terms shall impose additional obligations on that organization. If you are using the SERVICES as an employee of another organization that is not a party to an institutional agreement, you agree that you are solely responsible for ensuring that your use of said SERVICES is consistent with any requirements of your workplace and that the ability to use these SERVICES without an institutional agreement does not constitute the right to re-sell the Services or any derivative services thereof.

Your intellectual property rights

YOU represent, warrant, and agree that: YOU own all rights in the content or otherwise have obtained all necessary third-party rights, including, without limitation, copyrights, for any Documents or portions thereof that belong to third parties, which are necessary for you to grant the rights that you provide RITHA Publishing under this agreement to provide Services in connection with the Documents:

- The Documents contain nothing that will cause injury to any person or entity;

- The Documents will not contain any material that is infringing, illegal, sexually explicit, threatening, abusive, harassing, defamatory, libellous, invasive of privacy or publicity rights, or otherwise objectionable, including, without limitation, any material that could give rise to any liability to US or which might adversely affect the RITHA public image, reputation or goodwill; and

- The Documents to not include any infringing, misappropriated or plagiarized content that you do not have the rights to use.

It is your responsibility to determine if it is necessary for you to obtain, and for obtaining, any licenses required to use third party content which is part of the Documents. You will be responsible for making back-up and archival copies of your documents. In no event will WE be responsible to you or any other person for any loss, corruption or alteration of Documents.

Note: All articles published in the Journals are open access licensed under the terms of the Creative Commons Attribution License 4.0 which permits unrestricted, use, distribution and reproduction in any medium, or format for any purpose, even commercially provided the work is properly cited. A "License Agreement" will be complete by the author(s) if the submitted manuscript is accepted for publication allowing them to retain the copyright to their work. Example:

Author's Name 1, Author's Name 2, .... and Author's Name n. (year). Title of the paper. Title of the Journal, Volume xxxx, Issue x(xx), xx – xx. https://doi.org/10.57017/xxxx.vxx.x(xx).xx

Reproducing Published Material from other Publishers

- Authors must obtain permission to reproduce any published material (figures, schemes, tables, or text extracts) for which they do not hold the copyright. Permission should be sought from the copyright holder, typically the publisher.

- When permission is required:

      - For authors' own works published by other publishers where copyright was not retained;

      - For substantial extracts from others' works;

     - For using unaltered or slightly modified tables, graphs, charts, schemes, artworks, or photographs not owned by the author.

- When permission is not required:

      - Reconstruction of the author's own table with data published elsewhere, with proper citation;

      - Reasonably short quotes (considered fair use);

      - Graphs, charts, schemes, and artworks completely redrawn by the authors and significantly changed beyond recognition.

- Obtaining Permission:

      - Authors should start obtaining permissions early to avoid publication delays;

      - If unsure about copyright, it's recommended to apply for permission;

      - Acknowledgement of permission should follow a standard style if instructed by the copyright holder.

By submitting Documents to US through the Service, you agree to grant US an exclusive, worldwide for the following:

• - Hosting, reproducing, retaining, distributing, transmitting, and using your content — for example, to saving/achieving your content on our systems;
• - Publishing and achieving, publicly performing, or publicly displaying your content, applicable when you have registered and once you have approved the content to be made public;
• - Sublicense these rights to: Our contractors who have signed agreements with us that are consistent with these terms, only for the limited purposes to achieve the aims listed in this section.

YOU agree to permit US to use proprietary automation that may apply machine learning techniques to your Content for the future improvement of the Services.

YOU acknowledge and agree that WE may share Documents and aggregate data with SCIRES WEB Ltd and RITHA Publishing, which are affiliate of RITHA, as necessary to deliver the Services, improve the Services, and develop new products.

Our intellectual property rights

YOU acknowledge that SCIRES WEB LTD through RITHA and RITHA Publishing as its business units owns all right, title and interest in and to the website and the Services (the “RITHA Rights”), and such RITHA Rights are protected by Romania and international intellectual property laws. YOU also agree that you will not use any robot, spider, other automated device, or manual process to monitor or copy any content from the website, or create derivatives of any content from the SERVICE or of the proprietary software behind the website or the Services; (ii) directly or indirectly, reverse engineer or aid or assist in the reverse engineering of all or any part of Services or website except and only to the extent that such activity is expressly permitted by applicable law notwithstanding this limitation; or (iii) knowingly use the Services in any manner that could damage, disable, overburden, or impair those services or interfere with any other party's use and enjoyment of said services. Reverse engineering for purposes of this section includes, without limitation, decompiling, disassembly or otherwise deriving source code.

YOU further acknowledge that any trademarks, service marks, logos, and product and service names are trademarks of RITHA. Except as otherwise permitted by law, you agree that you will not use or display the RITHA Trademarks without RITHA’s prior written consent.

Prohibited conduct

By using the website or Services, you agree that you will not engage in any activity that violates applicable laws, is harmful to the Services, WE and our employees, or other users of the website and Services. We reserve the right to stop providing Services, terminate or suspend active accounts, and make files unavailable by deletion or removal of access in cases where infringing conduct occurs, including but not limited to the following:

• - Uploading, storing, or submitting for Services any material related to activities that exploit, harm, or threaten to harm children or any material that incites violence or instructs others in methods of performing illegal activities;
• - Uploading, storing, or submitting for services any material containing software or software code that is potentially harmful if transferred to, read by, or executed by OUR systems;
• - Circumventing, bypassing or breaching measures put in place to limit access to the Services, the features of the Services, or the rate at which they can be used or accessing the Services by any means other than a set of valid access credentials unique to the individual accessing those services combined with any relevant institutional credentials or access codes, including the dissemination of any institutional access codes beyond their intended group of authorised users by any means;
• - Abusing the services to circumvent copyright laws or plagiarism detection software or to facilitate the use of written material without permission or proper citation;
• - Sharing accounts with other users for the purpose of avoiding subscription fees;
• - Directing offensive or abusive speech toward employees and agents of US during customer service or other communication interactions;
• - Repeatedly filing complaints in bad faith or without a reasonable basis, and continuing to do so after we have asked you to stop (in such circumstances, we may alternatively suspend or restrict your access to the Services);
• - Hacking, exploiting, or reverse engineering the provided Services or their features or engaging in any use of the service intended to facilitate the development of a derivative product or service. Using or attempting to use the Services to access or reveal proprietary information owned by US or other parties;
• - Reselling the services or using them as a component in the delivery of any paid service without OUR express agreement.

Undertaking any other activity that may cause harm to US or OUR infrastructure, customers, employees, or affiliates.

Your account

Account Creation: Creation of an account is required to purchase or access the Services, and some services may only be available to users upon the activation of a paid subscription by the user or their parent institution.

Account Closure: You can close your account at any time, with or without reason, by contacting our Support team by email at office@ritha.eu. Closing your account will terminate your ability to use the Services and access to any services or subscriptions that you have purchased or to which you have access via an institutional agreement.

Account Suspension: WE may suspend your account if it has reason to believe that your secure login information has been compromised by a third party.

Account Termination: WE may terminate your account if required to do so by law or upon repeated failures to make timely payments, in addition to the breach of any provision of these terms and conditions.

Notifications: Notifications about substantial updates to these terms or our privacy notice, changes to account status, and changes to products or features may be communicated to you via email at the address supplied when you register your account.

Contacting Support: YOU can contact our account support team by email at office@ritha.eu.

Subscription Services: Certain services may be available only to customers with a paid subscription. We may periodically make changes to the Services offered, changing their features or function or the services available, without any requirement to notify users. Services may occasionally be made available in a beta or pre-release state for evaluation, and we have no obligation to add these services to our permanent offerings or to maintain features and functions from the beta version in any final release.

Subscription Terms: After payment of the fee for any subscription services, you will have access to the subscribed services for a period of one year following your payment date.

Refunds: No refund is offered for any subscribed or purchased services unless OUR expressly agreed or OUR authorized representative (SCIRES WEB LTD).

File Storage: While WE do not currently limit the space available for file storage by users of Digital and Professional services, WE reserve the right to institute storage limits in the future and does not guarantee that it will retain all files submitted for Services.

Rate of Use: WE reserve the right to limit the number of files that can be processed via automated Services in a given period in order to ensure quality of services for all users.

Disclaimer of warranties

WE are not responsible for the conduct, whether online or offline, of any user of the website. The website and the Services may be temporarily unavailable from time to time for various reasons. WE assume no responsibility for any error, omission, interruption, deletion, defect, delay in operation or transmission, communications line failure, theft or destruction or unauthorized access to, or alteration of, the website. WE are not responsible for any problems or technical malfunction of any telephone network or lines, computer online systems, servers or providers, computer equipment or software, or the failure of email on account of technical problems or traffic congestion on the Internet or at any web site, including injury or damage to any person’s computer related to or resulting from participating or downloading materials or Documents in connection with the website or the Services. 

WE make no guaranty of confidentiality or privacy of any communication or information transmitted on the website or any website linked to the www.ritha.eu. The website and the services are provided “as-is” and WE disclaim any and all warranties, whether express or implied, including without limitation implied warranties of title, merchantability, fitness for a particular purpose or non-infringement. WE cannot guarantee and do not promise any specific results or publication outcomes from use of the website and/or the services.

Without limiting the generality of the foregoing, you acknowledge and agree that WE do not: (i) review the substance of Documents submitted to it; (ii) represent, warrant or guarantee that your use of the service will result in publication of your documents; or (iii) guarantee the quality, accuracy or results of the Services. No refunds shall be provided except expressly agreed to by RITHA either in these Terms or in written correspondence to you. When using automated language and automated check Services, you acknowledge and agree that while these Services are designed and optimized to produce accurate outputs, WE cannot guarantee the preservation of intended textual meaning or exclude the possibility of substantive changes and therefore cannot guarantee the suitability of automatically edited and translated material for publication or the accuracy of automated assessments.

Customer Communications

By signing up for a free account with RITHA, you are opting in to receive communications from us regarding our products and services, including customer newsletters, special offers and exclusive discounts. You may opt out of these communications at any time by following the “unsubscribe” link at the bottom of any email. For more details about how we collect and use customer information, please visit our Privacy Notice page.

We reserve the right to refuse service to customers who ask us to engage in unethical publishing practices, are verbally abusive toward our customer service agents, and/or exploit OUR services and policies.

Miscellaneous

This AGREEMENT sets forth the entire agreement between YOU and RITHA pertaining to your use of the website and the Services. WE reserve the right, at our sole discretion, to change, modify, add, or delete portions of this Agreement at any time. without further notice. If we do this, we will post the changes to this Agreement on this page and will indicate at the top of this page the new effective date (i.e., the Last Updated date). The changes will only affect your use of the Services or the website after the effective date of the change unless we clearly indicate otherwise. While WE may notify you directly of material changes on this website, you must check this page from time to time to take notice of any changes we make, as they are binding on you. Your continued use of the Services or the website after any such changes constitutes your acceptance of the revised Agreement. If you do not agree to abide by this Agreement or any future revised Agreement, do not use or access the Services or the website. It is your responsibility to regularly review this Agreement. If any provision of this Agreement is held invalid or unenforceable, such provision shall be revised to the extent necessary to cure the invalidity or unenforceability, and the remainder of this Agreement shall continue in full force and effect. RITHA’s failure to exercise any right or provision of this Agreement shall not constitute a waiver of such right or provision.

Applicable Law

The law governing these Terms of Service and any dispute or claim arising out of or in connection with them or their subject matter or formation (including non-contractual disputes or claims), shall be governed by and construed in accordance with the laws of the Romania. Note that in the event of conflict will first try to solve them amicably, and if amicable settlement will not be possible, the conflict will be settled in court, according to Romanian laws.