Terms & conditions

About these terms

These draft terms describe the proposed relationship between the operator of the hosted Dynodoc service and people authorized to use it. The legal operator and governing jurisdiction have not yet been confirmed. This page is not an executed agreement or an assertion that an unidentified operator has entered into a contract with you.

Before these terms become effective, the operator must complete its identity and contact details, confirm the applicable law, review the provisions and communicate the final terms through an appropriate acceptance process. “Dynodoc,” “we” and “our” below refer to that operator. “You” means the individual using the service and, where properly authorized, the organization on whose behalf they act.

These terms concern the hosted service. The open-source software license and any separately agreed institutional, data-processing or service agreement are distinct. A signed agreement may take precedence where it expressly says so.

Accounts and access

Use an email address and identity that you are authorized to use. Provide accurate information needed for account operation. If you act for an organization, you must have the authority to use the service and upload its materials.

Protect access to your email account, sign-in links, authentication sessions and integration tokens. Do not share an account as a substitute for inviting collaborators individually. Tell the operator promptly if you suspect unauthorized access, using the contact channel to be established below.

The pilot is intended for adult researchers and authorized collaborators who can enter a binding agreement under applicable law. Participation by someone who cannot do so requires an appropriate institutional or representative arrangement; the service is not directed at children.

Access may depend on an invitation, a document role and the availability of the configured authentication provider. Being able to sign in does not grant access to every research document.

The research pilot

Dynodoc provides a web workspace for research documents, spreadsheets and questionnaires, with imports, exports, personal drafts, selected-change sharing, review and content history. Feature availability depends on the current release and deployment configuration.

This is a pilot for a small research team. It does not promise full feature or file-format parity with Microsoft Word, Excel, Google Docs or Google Sheets. It does not currently provide real-time character-by-character co-editing, all advanced spreadsheet functions or a complete survey execution platform.

The homepage contains interactive illustrations that use sample information. They demonstrate a workflow and do not create an account, save a real document or submit research responses.

There is no payment collection flow in the current pilot. If paid services are introduced, pricing and any billing terms must be disclosed and agreed before a charge is authorized. These draft terms do not authorize automatic charges.

Your content and ownership

You and the relevant rights holders retain ownership of the research materials, documents, data and other content you submit. Using Dynodoc does not transfer that ownership to the operator.

The proposed service permission is limited to hosting, storing, reproducing, transmitting, converting, displaying, backing up and otherwise processing your content as necessary to provide the features you request, apply your sharing settings, maintain the service and meet applicable legal obligations. It is not a permission to sell your content or use it to train AI models.

You must have the rights and authority needed to upload, process and share the content, including permission for copyrighted material and an appropriate basis for personal information. Do not grant another person access that exceeds your own authority.

Dynodoc’s application code is available under the GNU Affero General Public License, version 3 or later, as specified in the repository. That software license does not make your private research content public or apply an open-source license to it. Third-party software and trademarks remain subject to their own licenses and rights.

Collaboration and history

Document membership and roles determine what collaborators can do. People authorized to manage access are responsible for assigning appropriate roles and reviewing access when a project or team changes. Collaborators remain responsible for copies they download, export or share outside the service.

Personal drafts let you work separately from the team version. Sharing selected changes updates the shared work through the available review and conflict-resolution flow. You are responsible for reviewing the proposed result, particularly when two people have changed the same material.

Authorship, timestamps and content changes may be shown in history. Restoring earlier content creates a new change rather than rewriting the past. These records support review; they are not a guarantee of research validity, a comprehensive record of every administrative action or a legally certified audit trail.

Retention and personal-information requests must be handled under the privacy policy and applicable law. These terms do not remove statutory rights to correction or erasure where they apply.

Research responsibilities

You and your organization are responsible for the study design, research quality, ethics review, participant notices, consent or other lawful basis, disclosure limits, authorship decisions and any regulatory or professional requirements that apply to your work.

Do not assume that a questionnaire, imported field, formula or preserved logic expression has been validated simply because it is displayed by Dynodoc. The pilot preserves some survey metadata without executing or validating all relevance rules, constraints or calculations.

Evaluate the pilot using sample or appropriately de-identified materials before relying on it for a study. Identifiable, sensitive or regulated data requires an agreed assessment of hosting, access, retention, transfers and institutional requirements. No certification, regulated-data hosting arrangement or institutional approval is implied by these terms.

The service is a collaboration tool. It does not provide clinical, legal, ethical or methodological approval, and it must not be used as the sole system for a decision whose failure could cause serious harm.

Imports and third-party services

Imports and exports may change formatting, omit unsupported features or convert formulas and structures differently from the source application. Review warnings and verify the result. The original upload is retained for reference, but retaining an original does not guarantee perfect conversion.

ODK Central and KoboToolbox connections retrieve material at your request using credentials you supply. You must be authorized to use the server, project and data. Current imports create snapshots; there is no promise of automatic synchronization, complete migration or writeback to a source platform.

Compatibility with other named research tools is limited to the file workflows described in the interface. Native applications, platform-specific scripts, advanced survey behavior and unsupported file features are not included merely because a product is listed.

Third-party services, identity providers and external content have their own terms and availability. Product names and logos identify compatibility and belong to their respective owners. They do not imply a partnership, sponsorship or endorsement of Dynodoc.

Acceptable use

Use the service lawfully and within your authorization. In particular, do not:

• Upload or share material in violation of privacy, confidentiality, intellectual-property rights or applicable law.
• Attempt to access another person’s private documents, credentials, sessions or server resources without permission.
• Introduce malicious files, deliberately disrupt the service, circumvent access controls or use connectors to probe unrelated private systems.
• Impersonate another person, misrepresent your authority over research materials or falsify your identity to conceal unauthorized contributions.
• Use the service to send unsolicited messages, host unrelated abusive traffic or knowingly interfere with other users’ work.

Good-faith security reports should go to the operator’s private contact channel once established. Do not publish credentials, participant data or exploit details in public repository issues.

Availability and changes

The pilot may be unavailable during maintenance, changes, provider outages or unexpected failures. No service-level agreement, uninterrupted availability, guaranteed recovery time or fixed support response time is offered by this draft.

Keep independent copies of important source material and validated exports. A hosted backup process does not replace your organization’s research retention and recovery arrangements.

The operator may improve, change or retire features. Material changes affecting access to existing work should be communicated with reasonable notice where practicable, and a reasonable opportunity to export should be provided when the service is discontinued, unless a legal or urgent security constraint prevents it.

Any final terms must explain how material contractual changes are notified and accepted where required. Changes should take effect prospectively and cannot remove non-waivable rights.

Suspension and ending use

You may stop using the service and request assistance with account closure through the operator. Sign-out, document archiving and account closure are different actions. None should be understood as a promise of immediate permanent deletion of all history.

The proposed grounds for restricting access are a substantiated breach of these terms, a serious security or operational risk, a legal requirement or the end of the pilot. Any restriction should be proportionate. Where lawful and practical, the operator should explain the reason and provide a way to seek review.

When access ends, previously authorized collaborators may still have access to shared research materials under the relevant project arrangement. Export, retention, deletion and any surviving permissions must be handled consistently with applicable law, the organization’s authority and the final privacy notice.

Warranties and responsibility

To the extent permitted by applicable law, the proposed pilot is provided on an “as available” basis without a promise that every feature will be error-free, suitable for a particular study or continuously accessible. You must verify outputs, conversions, calculations and shared revisions before relying on them.

Nothing in these draft terms excludes liability that cannot lawfully be excluded, waives mandatory consumer or data-protection rights, excuses fraud or deliberate misconduct, or transfers the operator’s own legal duties to users.

No financial liability cap, blanket indemnity or jurisdiction-specific exclusion is invented here. Any such provision must be reviewed in light of the confirmed operator, service arrangement and applicable law before final terms are adopted. Until then, these drafts must not be represented as a complete allocation of legal risk.

Law and disputes

The governing law, competent forum and operator’s legal address remain to be confirmed. No mandatory arbitration, class-action waiver or exclusive court is designated by this draft.

The proposed first step for a service dispute is to contact the operator with enough detail to investigate it. This does not prevent a person from contacting an appropriate regulator, exercising statutory rights or seeking remedies available under applicable law.

General provisions

The final terms, any applicable signed agreement and the privacy notice should describe the entire relevant arrangement without overriding mandatory legal protections. If a provision is unenforceable, the remaining provisions should continue only to the extent permitted by applicable law.

Failure to enforce a provision on one occasion does not automatically waive it for another occasion. Software licenses and rights in research content remain independent of account access to this hosted pilot.

The operator must preserve a dated copy of adopted terms and communicate material revisions appropriately. The date at the top of this page is a drafting date, not a record of your acceptance.

Operator and contact details

Legal operator

Awaiting confirmation.

Public legal email

Awaiting confirmation.

Mailing address

Awaiting confirmation.

Governing law

Awaiting confirmation.

Effective date

Not set; this is a draft.

During the limited pilot, contact the administrator who invited you for operational questions. Before public adoption, these details must be completed and the terms reviewed for the operator’s jurisdiction and actual service arrangements.