Terms & Conditions

1.Operator and scope

These terms govern your access to and use of the World Wide platform at world-wide.org, including its domain-branded areas, conference portals, feeds, and APIs (together, the “Service”). The Service is operated by Science Communications Worldwide (Science Communications Worldwide - Verein zur weltweiten Verbreitung wissenschaftlicher Kommunikation), a non-profit association registered in Austria (ZVR 1255966019), c/o Tim Vogels, Fischergasse 6, 3400 Klosterneuburg, Austria (“we”, “us”). By using the Service you agree to these terms; if you do not agree, do not use the Service.

Individual programmes may carry supplementary terms — for example the FENS 2026 ePoster posting terms — which prevail over these terms for those submissions to the extent they differ.

2.The service

World Wide collects, hosts, and makes discoverable research activity across scientific domains: seminars, lectures, conferences, workshops, courses, ePosters, preprints, podcasts, jobs, and grants. Content originates from users, from event and conference organisers, and from public sources that we index. The Service is provided free of charge in pursuit of the association’s non-profit purpose; nothing in these terms creates an entitlement to any particular feature or to continued operation of the Service.

3.Eligibility and accounts

• You must be at least 14 years old to create an account. The Service addresses the research community and is not directed at children. A new account remains restricted to the onboarding page until the signed-in user explicitly confirms this minimum-age rule; we record the confirmation time and policy version, not a date of birth.
• Sign-in currently uses Google or a passkey; no other identity provider is offered at present. You are responsible for the security of those credentials and for activity under your account; tell us promptly at info@world-wide.org if you suspect unauthorised use.
• Information you provide — profile details, listings, applications — must be accurate and kept reasonably up to date. Do not impersonate any person or organisation.
• If you act for an organisation (for example posting jobs as an employer), you confirm that you are authorised to bind it, and these terms apply to it as well.

4.Your content and the licence you grant

You retain all intellectual-property rights in content you submit. So that we can operate the Service, you grant us a non-exclusive, worldwide, royalty-free licence to host, store, reproduce, format, excerpt, publicly display, and distribute your content through the Service and its interfaces (listings, feeds, embeds, APIs), and to create the technical derivatives needed for discovery — thumbnails, previews, machine-readable indexes and semantic representations, and machine-generated summaries. The licence includes the right to have these acts performed by our contracted infrastructure and processing providers.

The licence ends when your content is removed from the Service, except that (a) removed content may persist in backups for the limited backup-retention period, (b) the DOI and the minimum metadata needed for a correction or tombstone can remain under Section 5, subject to applicable data-protection rights, and (c) we may retain records where legally required. By submitting content you warrant that you hold the necessary rights, that the content is lawful and does not infringe third-party rights, and — where it names other people — that you are entitled to provide their information.

5.DOIs and the scholarly record

For qualifying content we can register Digital Object Identifiers (DOIs) through DataCite. A DOI is a persistent identifier intended to keep resolving even if the work is withdrawn. Registration distributes bibliographic metadata, including author names, through DataCite’s global systems. If content is removed, the DOI normally resolves to a tombstone rather than disappearing. Metadata can be corrected, and we assess requests to erase or reduce personal metadata under the GDPR; persistence of the identifier is not an automatic exception to those rights. Request DOI registration only if you and all co-authors understand this persistent scholarly-record design.

6.Acceptable use

When using the Service, you must not:

• post content that is unlawful, defamatory, discriminatory, or that infringes intellectual-property, personality, or privacy rights;
• post misleading listings — fabricated events, deceptive job offers, or scholarly work you are not entitled to present;
• upload malicious code, or attempt to probe, breach, or disrupt the Service, its infrastructure, or other users’ accounts (good-faith security research under our responsible-disclosure policy is welcome);
• scrape, harvest, or bulk-extract content or personal data in violation of our robots directives and rate limits, or use the Service to build a competing dataset of its users;
• send spam or unsolicited advertising through platform features, or misuse contact details published in listings;
• circumvent access controls, moderation decisions, or rate limits, including by automated account creation.

7.Content standards, reports, and moderation

Submissions pass through automated screening, including rules and machine-learning checks. Automated rules can approve or reject a submission; you may contest an outcome and request human review. We may decline, edit for format, or remove content that violates these terms, our content posting policy, or applicable law. Anyone can report content via the report controls on the Service or by email to info@world-wide.org; include the URL and the reason. For a notice of suspected illegal content, also provide a sufficiently substantiated explanation of why it is illegal, your name and email address (except where EU law permits an anonymous notice), and a statement that you believe in good faith that the information is accurate and complete. We apply the Digital Services Act Article 16 notice-and-action standard to hosted user content without relying on a narrower final classification: notices that enable a diligent provider to identify illegality are reviewed promptly and the reporter receives a decision where contact details are available. We act where justified and — where we remove or restrict your content — state the reason and provide an opportunity to respond. Repeated or serious violations can lead to account suspension under Section 13.

8.Third-party content and services

The Service links to and embeds third-party content — external event pages, funder sites, video platforms, publisher records. That content belongs to its providers, its accuracy is theirs, and their terms and privacy policies apply when you interact with it. Listings aggregated from public sources reproduce what the source published; we identify the source and correct or remove entries on substantiated notice, but we do not adopt third-party content as our own.

9.AI-assisted features

Parts of the Service are produced or assisted by machine-learning systems — form pre-filling, summaries, topic descriptions, classification, semantic search, and recommendations, as described in the AI Transparency Statement. Machine-generated material can be incomplete or wrong. Verify essential details — dates, deadlines, eligibility, scientific claims — against the original source before relying on them. AI output on the Service is information support, not professional, legal, medical, or career advice.

10.Intellectual property

The Service’s software, design, and compilation are protected; the “World Wide” name and related branding may not be used in ways that imply endorsement without written permission. Content hosted on the Service belongs to its respective rights holders. Permitted and prohibited uses of hosted content, and the procedure for infringement notices, are set out in the Intellectual Property Policy.

11.Data protection

How we process personal data — including data about people named in listings — is governed by the Privacy Notice and the Cookie Policy, which form part of the information we owe you but are not contractual terms.

12.Availability and changes to the service

We operate the Service with care but free of charge, and we do not promise uninterrupted availability. Features may evolve, be gated, or be retired as the platform develops. If we discontinue a feature that holds your content, or the Service as a whole, we will give reasonable advance notice where feasible so you can retrieve your material — except where immediate action is required for security or legal reasons.

13.Termination

• By you: you may stop using the Service at any time and delete your account under Settings → Security. Deletion follows the 30-day restoration window described in the Data Retention & Deletion Policy.
• By us: we may suspend or terminate accounts, or restrict features, where these terms are violated, where required by law, or where necessary to protect the Service or its users. Except in urgent cases we will state the reason and hear your response.
• Sections 4 (surviving licence aspects), 5, 14, and 15 survive termination.

14.Warranties and liability

The Service is provided free of charge and, to the extent legally permissible, without warranty for completeness, accuracy, or fitness of hosted content — listings, programme data, and machine-generated material are information aids, not verified records. Our liability is governed by applicable Austrian law. Nothing in these Terms limits liability or remedies that cannot lawfully be excluded or restricted, including your mandatory consumer rights.

You are responsible for content you post. If a third party raises claims against us because content you submitted violates these terms or the law, you will support us in resolving the matter and bear the resulting costs to the extent you are responsible for the violation.

15.Governing law and disputes

These terms are governed by Austrian law, excluding its conflict-of-law rules and the UN Convention on Contracts for the International Sale of Goods. If you use the Service as a consumer, this choice of law does not deprive you of the protection of mandatory provisions of the law of your country of habitual residence, and statutory consumer venues remain available to you. For everyone else, the courts at our seat in Austria have jurisdiction. We are not obliged to participate in consumer-arbitration proceedings and have not committed to do so; we prefer to resolve concerns directly — write to info@world-wide.org.

16.Changes to these terms

We may revise these terms when the Service or the law changes. For material changes we will give account holders reasonable advance notice through the platform or by email and request fresh agreement where applicable law or the nature of the change requires it. Revised terms apply prospectively from their stated effective date. If you do not agree, stop using the Service and delete your account. The version and date above identify the current revision; earlier versions are available on request.

17.Final provisions

If a provision of these terms is or becomes invalid, the remaining provisions stay in force; the invalid provision is replaced by the statutory rule closest to its purpose. No side agreements exist. Questions about these terms: info@world-wide.org.