AuthorAZ

Rights & Privacy Index

What actually happens to your manuscript, your rights and your data when you use a publishing service. What licence you grant, whether it can be revoked, who else can exercise it, what the terms say about training AI on your work — and, just as often, what they carefully do not say.

Read from the services’ own agreements, not their marketing. How this is assessed.

8 of 8 database services have been assessed. A service appears here only once its terms have actually been read — an unassessed service is absent rather than shown as a page of blanks.

What the postures mean

Strong
The terms actively protect the author: narrow, revocable licences and explicit limits on reuse.
Generally protective
The terms are scoped to what the service needs to operate, with clear routes to withdraw.
Mixed
Some terms protect the author and others do not, or an important question is left unanswered.
Concerning
The terms grant more than the service needs, or make withdrawal difficult.
Unclear
The documentation does not establish the position well enough to characterise it.

These are editorial judgements, not scores. There is deliberately no number attached to them — a 0–100 rating would imply a precision the underlying evidence does not support. Read the methodology.