Terms of Service

Welcome, and thank you for visiting EditorialXML. EditorialXML provides professional editorial XML production and validation services for scientific journals, universities, and academic publishers.

EditorialXML is a service operated by Lynsoft LLC (“Company,” “we,” or “our”). These Terms of Service (“Terms”) govern your access to and use of the editorialxml.com website, the free JATS validator, paid validation reports, contact and quote forms, and any related services we make available (collectively, the “Service”).

For questions about how we handle information collected through the Service, see our Privacy Notice at editorialxml.com/privacy or write to [email protected].

If you do not agree to these Terms, please do not use the Service.

EditorialXML provides editorial XML production, validation, quality control, and related deliverables for academic journal articles and issues, under standards such as JATS and SciELO-compatible workflows.

The Service includes: informational website pages; a free JATS validator that returns automated validation results; paid validation reports purchased through checkout; and professional editorial services performed under a separate agreement.

We may change, suspend, or discontinue features of the website or the Service where reasonably necessary for maintenance, security, legal compliance, or operational improvement.

You accept these Terms by an affirmative act: checking the acceptance box when you create an account or complete a purchase, or using a control that is labeled as agreement to these Terms and acknowledgment of the Privacy Notice.

Each accepted version is identified by a version number and a content hash of the archived text, and the version and language you accepted are recorded with your acceptance. That recorded version governs the action you took.

Where you accept on behalf of an organization, you represent that you are authorized to bind that organization, and “you” includes that organization.

“Service Agreement” means a proposal, statement of work, work order, order form, contract, or other written or electronic agreement accepted by both you and the Company for a specific project.

If there is a conflict, the following order applies: (1) a signed or expressly accepted Service Agreement; (2) the terms applicable to a specific order or checkout; (3) these Terms.

A Service Agreement governs only the project it describes. It does not modify these Terms for unrelated projects, for other orders, or for use of the free validator, unless it expressly says so.

A quote, proposal, or estimate does not create a binding contract until both parties confirm it in writing or electronically.

You must be at least 18 years old and legally capable of entering into a binding contract to use the Service.

The Service is primarily intended for institutions, publishers, and professionals acting on behalf of an organization. Where you act for an organization, you represent that you have the authority necessary to bind it to these Terms.

You may not use the Service if applicable law or sanctions prohibit us from providing it to you.

Some features require an account. You agree to provide accurate registration information and to keep it current.

You are responsible for safeguarding your credentials and for activity that occurs under your account. Notify us at [email protected] promptly if you suspect unauthorized access.

We may suspend or restrict an account where we reasonably suspect compromise, fraud, abusive use, or breach of these Terms.

You agree to use the Service only for lawful purposes and in accordance with these Terms.

You may not: use robots, crawlers, scrapers, or other automated tools to access, extract, or monitor the Service without our prior written consent; interfere with the operation of the Service, circumvent rate limits or security measures, or access unauthorized areas or systems; transmit viruses, malware, or other harmful code, or content that infringes third-party rights; or submit false or misleading information, or information you are not entitled to share.

We may apply rate limits, quotas, and antifraud measures, and may suspend or restrict access if we suspect fraud, abusive use, illegal activity, or a breach of these Terms.

Your use of the free JATS validator is governed by these Terms, by our Privacy Notice at editorialxml.com/privacy, and by your settings in Data Controls at editorialxml.com/validator/data-controls. The Privacy Notice explains how personal data is processed and on what legal basis; this section addresses copyright and the licenses you grant in the content you submit.

You retain ownership of the content you submit through the free validator. Nothing here transfers ownership of your article or grants us a perpetual or irrevocable license to the submitted article itself.

Operating license. You grant Lynsoft LLC a non-exclusive, worldwide, royalty-free license to: host and store your submission for the retention period disclosed in the Privacy Notice; make technical reproductions needed to operate the Service; and parse, transform, analyze, and evaluate the submission in order to produce and deliver your validation result. This license is sublicensable only to processors and contractors performing those operations for us, and only to the extent needed to perform them.

Improvement license. Where product-improvement retention is enabled for your submission under Data Controls, you additionally grant Lynsoft LLC a non-exclusive, worldwide, royalty-free license to include eligible submitted content in approved internal datasets and to use it to develop, train, test, and evaluate our own automated systems and models. You can disable this for future submissions in Data Controls. Public availability of an article does not, by itself, authorize unrestricted training or reuse.

Both licenses are limited by your Data Controls settings, the Privacy Notice, and our retention rules. We do not sell your submitted content, and we do not license it to third parties for their own independent purposes.

End of the license to your raw content. If product-improvement retention is disabled when you submit content, the Improvement License does not apply to that submission. Disabling retention later applies to future submissions and does not by itself delete content already retained. For retained content, the applicable license ends when the content is deleted in response to a deletion or valid withdrawal request, when an applicable objection is granted, or when the retention period expires, whichever occurs first, except for residual copies in routine backups handled as described in the Privacy Notice.

Limited survival of derived results. Non-identifying derived results created before that end date — such as aggregate statistics, error patterns, and model improvements that do not reproduce your content and do not identify you or any individual — may continue to be used after the raw-content license ends. Where a model, dataset, or derived result still contains personal data or could reproduce identifiable content, it is treated as personal data under the Privacy Notice and is subject to the rights described there.

You represent that you have the necessary rights and authorization to upload and process the content you submit through the free validator, and that doing so does not violate confidentiality, copyright, licensing, embargo, or other contractual restrictions. Do not submit confidential peer-review materials, or content containing directly identifiable patient information or other sensitive personal information for which the free validator is not intended.

Paid and private flows — for example paid validation reports and professional deliverables — are not used for free-validator product improvement or model training. They are processed to produce the contracted deliverable and are treated as private.

The free validator is offered “as is,” without a warranty of uninterrupted availability or freedom from errors.

Validation results are informational and automated. They may contain false positives and false negatives, and they depend on the profile, schema, ruleset, and software version selected or in force when the check runs. Results for the same file may differ between versions or profiles.

A validation result is not a certification, accreditation, or approval, and it does not guarantee acceptance by SciELO, PubMed Central, PubMed, Crossref, DOAJ, or any journal, publisher, indexer, repository, or submission platform.

Validation results do not replace official validation tools, publisher requirements, or professional editorial judgment. You remain responsible for your final submission and publication decisions.

Lynsoft LLC and EditorialXML are not affiliated with, endorsed by, sponsored by, or certified by the organizations that maintain those standards, indexes, or platforms. Their names are used descriptively to describe compatibility only.

When you submit a quote request or contact us through the Service, you represent that the information provided is truthful and complete and that you are authorized to share any attached materials.

We use files, samples, and documents you send for evaluation to: analyze your project; prepare a quote or proposal; perform the resulting Service Agreement; administer the relationship, including billing and record-keeping; protect the security and integrity of the Service and prevent abuse; comply with legal obligations; and establish, exercise, or defend legal claims.

Quote attachments and evaluation samples are not used for free-validator product improvement or for training our models, unless you separately agree to that in writing.

We do not guarantee the award of any project or the acceptance of any request.

You retain ownership of the editorial content, manuscripts, metadata, images, and other materials you deliver to us for a paid order or a Service Agreement (“Client Content”).

You warrant that you own or have obtained the rights necessary to provide the Client Content to us, and that our processing of it in accordance with your instructions and the applicable Service Agreement will not infringe third-party rights or violate applicable law, including author, institutional, and platform authorizations where relevant. The Company remains responsible for its own acts that go beyond your instructions and the agreed scope.

You grant us a limited, non-exclusive license to store, reproduce, transform, and process Client Content only as necessary to: evaluate a quote; fulfill a paid order; perform the contracted service; maintain security and backups; and comply with legal obligations. This license is sublicensable only to processors and contractors performing those activities for us.

Client Content provided for paid orders or professional services is excluded from free-validator improvement and from model training unless you expressly agree otherwise in writing.

You are responsible for the accuracy, legality, and quality of the source material. Our work consists of editorial XML production and validation within the agreed scope; it does not replace your journal’s or organization’s editorial, scientific, or legal decisions.

A paid report is a one-time purchase of a professional validation report for the file you submit. The price and currency shown at checkout apply to that order, and applicable taxes are added or included as indicated at checkout.

Payments are processed by Stripe. We do not receive or store your full payment card details; Stripe processes payment data under its own terms and privacy policy.

Your order is accepted when payment is confirmed and we begin generating the report. We may decline or cancel an order — for example, where we suspect fraud, where the file is unsupported, or where we are legally required to — and in that case we refund the amount charged for that order.

Delivery is by download link. The link is valid for seven (7) days from issuance. Please download and store your own copy within that period. Expiry of the link does not by itself mean that the report has been deleted from our systems; report retention is described in the Privacy Notice.

If your download link stops working within its validity period, or if you are charged more than once for the same order, contact [email protected]. We will investigate and, if the issue is confirmed, reissue the link or refund or correct the duplicate charge, as applicable.

Refunds. If we fail for technical reasons to produce or deliver your report, we will regenerate it or refund the amount you paid for that order. We do not refund because the report’s findings are unwanted, unfavorable, or different from what you expected — a report that correctly identifies problems has been delivered as described. After a report has been successfully delivered, we do not provide refunds except where applicable law requires it.

If you initiate a chargeback without contacting us first, or where we detect payment fraud, we may suspend access to reports and decline further orders while the matter is resolved.

There is no subscription. Paid reports are one-time purchases; nothing renews automatically and no recurring charge is created.

Paid reports are offered for organizational or professional use — that is, for purposes related to your trade, business, craft, or profession — and at checkout we ask you to confirm that this is the case. That confirmation is a statement about your intended use. It does not by itself determine your legal status, and it does not waive or override mandatory consumer-protection or other non-waivable rights that may apply to you under applicable law.

When your paid report has been delivered, we grant you — and the organization on whose behalf you purchased it — a limited, non-exclusive, non-transferable, worldwide license to use the report for internal editorial and quality-control purposes.

That license includes reproducing the report internally and sharing it with the journal staff, authors, publishers, clients, or submission platforms for whom it is reasonably necessary in connection with the article or submission it concerns.

You may not, except as expressly permitted above, resell or otherwise redistribute the report, or offer the reporting service to third parties as if it were your own; remove or alter attribution, copyright, or version notices, or otherwise pass off our system or its output as your own product; or reverse engineer, decompile, or attempt to reconstruct our rulesets, profiles, or software from the reports.

We retain all rights in the report format, rulesets, profiles, and underlying systems.

For professional services, fees, payment methods, delivery timelines, and scope of work are defined in each proposal or Service Agreement.

Unless otherwise stated in writing: prices do not include applicable taxes, which are invoiced where required; failure to pay may suspend execution of the project and delivery of deliverables; and timelines depend on timely receipt of complete materials and clear instructions from you.

Unless otherwise agreed in a Service Agreement, the final deliverables agreed for your project are assigned or licensed to you as set out in that agreement, once the applicable payment conditions are met.

The Company retains all rights in its methodology, processes, tools, templates, know-how, software, rulesets, internal documentation, and any improvements developed while providing the Service, unless otherwise agreed in writing.

The website, its design and texts, the EditorialXML brand, and other elements of the Service belong to the Company or its licensors. You receive no rights in them beyond the limited use necessary to access the Service under these Terms.

“Confidential Information” means non-public information disclosed by one party to the other in connection with the Service that is identified as confidential or that a reasonable person would understand to be confidential, including unpublished manuscripts, pricing, methodologies, and technical and business information.

Each party will protect the other party’s Confidential Information with at least reasonable care — and no less care than it uses for its own similar information — and will use it only for the purposes of the Service or the applicable Service Agreement.

Each party may disclose Confidential Information to its employees, contractors, processors, and professional advisors who need it for those purposes and who are bound by confidentiality duties at least as protective as this section. The disclosing party remains responsible for their compliance.

If a party is required by law or by a competent authority to disclose Confidential Information, it will, where legally permitted, give prompt notice to the other party, disclose only what is legally required, and seek confidential treatment for the disclosed material.

This section does not apply to information that: is or becomes public without breach of these Terms; was lawfully known to the receiving party without a duty of confidence; is independently developed without use of the Confidential Information; or is lawfully received from a third party free of any confidentiality obligation.

Confidentiality obligations for unpublished manuscripts continue until the manuscript is lawfully published, released from confidentiality in writing, or otherwise enters the public domain without breach. For other Confidential Information, these obligations apply while the relationship continues and for three (3) years afterwards, and for as long as the information qualifies as a trade secret under applicable law. On written request, each party will return or delete the other party’s Confidential Information, subject to legal retention duties and to routine backups that are overwritten on their normal cycle.

This section does not authorize you to submit confidential, embargoed, or peer-review content through the free JATS validator, and it does not override the licenses, limits, or restrictions in the Free JATS validator section of these Terms. A Service Agreement may add stricter confidentiality terms for a specific project.

The Service relies on third-party providers — including Stripe for payments, Cloudflare for delivery and security, and hosting and email providers — and may link to third-party websites, standards bodies, indexes, or submission platforms that we do not control.

Some third-party services, such as payment pages or external websites, may be provided directly to you and governed by their own terms and privacy notices. Other providers process information or provide infrastructure on our behalf under our contractual arrangements with them. Except as applicable law requires, we are not responsible for the availability, content, or practices of third-party services or sites that we do not control.

The website, the free JATS validator, and the information published on them are provided “as is” and “as available,” for informational purposes. To the maximum extent permitted by applicable law, we do not warrant that they are free of errors, interruptions, or vulnerabilities, and we disclaim implied warranties of merchantability, fitness for a particular purpose, non-infringement, and accuracy.

Professional editorial production services are provided under the scope, standards, and limitations defined in the applicable Service Agreement. Except for an express warranty agreed in writing, we do not guarantee specific indexing outcomes, acceptance by third-party platforms, or compliance with future editorial requirements changed by third parties.

Some jurisdictions do not allow certain warranty exclusions, so parts of this section may not apply to you.

To the maximum extent permitted by applicable law, the Company will not be liable for indirect, incidental, special, or consequential damages, lost profits, loss of data, or business interruption arising from use of the website or the Service, even if we were advised of the possibility of such damages.

Paid Services. For claims arising from a paid Service, the Company’s total aggregate liability will not exceed the amounts you actually paid to the Company for the specific paid Service, order, or Service Agreement giving rise to the claim. Where an ongoing project relationship applies, that ceiling is the amount paid under the relevant Service Agreement during the twelve (12) months preceding the event giving rise to the claim; for a one-off purchase such as a single paid report, the ceiling is the amount paid for that order. A Service Agreement may set a different limit for its project.

Free Services. For all claims arising from use of any free portion of the Service (including the free JATS validator and unpaid website features), whether brought as one claim or as multiple claims arising from the same or related free use, the Company’s total aggregate liability will not exceed one hundred US dollars (US$100), to the maximum extent permitted by applicable law. This limit is an aggregate ceiling for that free use, not US$100 per incident.

Carveouts. Nothing in this section limits liability for: willful misconduct or gross negligence; fraud or fraudulent misrepresentation; death or personal injury caused by negligence, where that applies; or any statutory or mandatory right, including mandatory consumer rights, that cannot be waived or limited under applicable law.

You will defend, indemnify, and hold harmless the Company, its directors, employees, and contractors from third-party claims, and from the losses, liabilities, costs, and reasonable attorneys’ fees awarded in or paid to settle those claims, to the extent they arise from: Client Content or content you submit through the free validator; your lack of the rights or authorizations you represented you had; instructions you gave us that were unlawful; your misuse of the Service; or your material breach of these Terms or of a Service Agreement.

Procedure. We will give you prompt written notice of the claim — a delay relieves you only to the extent it prejudices your defense — and you may control the defense with counsel of your choosing that is reasonably acceptable to us. We will cooperate reasonably at your expense, and we may participate with our own counsel at our own expense.

You may not settle a claim in a way that admits fault by the Company, imposes any non-monetary obligation or payment on the Company, or does not fully release the Company, without our prior written consent.

This section covers third-party claims only; it does not create an obligation to indemnify us for claims between you and us.

We may suspend or terminate your access to the Service, immediately and without additional liability, if you breach these Terms, if required by law, or for reasonable operational or security reasons.

Termination of website or account access does not by itself affect existing Service Agreements or paid orders already accepted, which continue to be governed by their own terms. After termination, we retain or delete information in accordance with applicable law, the Privacy Notice, and our contractual obligations.

We may update these Terms. Updates apply prospectively from the date the new version is published; they do not retroactively rewrite completed orders or existing Service Agreements.

The version you accepted at the time of a purchase or order governs that order. Each published version has a version identifier and an archived text with a content hash, so the version you accepted can be identified later.

Where a change is material, we may ask you to accept the new version before you continue using the features it covers. We publish updated versions on this website with a new “Last updated” date.

These Terms, and any dispute, controversy, or claim arising out of or relating to them, the website, or the Service, are governed by the laws of the State of Wyoming, United States of America, without giving effect to its conflict-of-laws principles.

Any legal action, suit, or proceeding arising from these Terms will be brought exclusively in the state or federal courts located in the State of Wyoming, and you agree to submit to the jurisdiction of those courts.

Nothing in this section deprives you of the protection of mandatory provisions of the law of the country where you habitually reside, or of any statutory or non-waivable rights — including mandatory consumer-protection rights and the right to bring proceedings before the courts your local law reserves for you — where those rights apply to you.

Neither party is liable for a failure or delay in performing its obligations (other than payment obligations already due) caused by events beyond its reasonable control, including natural disasters, war, civil unrest, labor disputes, epidemics, government action, failures of telecommunications, internet, hosting, or power infrastructure, and large-scale cyberattacks.

The affected party will notify the other where practicable and resume performance as soon as reasonably possible. If the event continues for more than sixty (60) days, either party may terminate the affected order or Service Agreement, and amounts paid for undelivered work will be refunded.

You may not assign or transfer these Terms, or any rights or obligations under them, without our prior written consent. We may assign them to an affiliate or to a successor in connection with a merger, reorganization, or sale of assets, provided the assignee assumes our obligations.

Nothing in these Terms creates a partnership, joint venture, agency, franchise, or employment relationship between the parties.

These Terms do not create rights for any third party, except that the indemnified persons named in the Indemnification section may rely on that section.

We may send notices to the email address associated with your account or order, or by posting them on the website. You agree to receive communications relating to the Service in electronic form, and you agree that electronic acceptance records satisfy any requirement that an agreement be in writing.

Send notices to us at [email protected], including your order or project reference where relevant. Notices sent by email are effective on the day they are sent, unless the sender receives a delivery failure.

Keep the email address associated with your account or order current; we are not responsible for notices you do not receive because that address is outdated or filters our messages.

The following survive termination or expiry of these Terms, of an account, or of a Service Agreement: the license terms in the Free JATS validator section (as limited by that section), Client Content licenses to the extent needed to complete or defend the work, intellectual property, confidentiality, warranties and disclaimers, limitation of liability, indemnification, governing law and jurisdiction, language, notices, this section, and the general provisions, along with any payment obligations already accrued.

Records of your acceptance of these Terms — the version, language, content hash, and timestamp — are also retained after account or order deletion, because they are the evidence of the agreement that governed those actions.

These Terms are published in English and Spanish. The version and language you affirmatively accepted govern the action you took, and both are recorded with your acceptance.

The two language versions of the same version identifier are intended to be materially equivalent. If a conflict of meaning arises between the English and Spanish texts of the same version, the English text controls for interpretation.

This does not deprive you of mandatory rights available to you under the law of your jurisdiction, including any right to rely on terms provided in your own language.

If any provision of these Terms is held invalid or unenforceable, that provision will be limited or removed to the minimum extent necessary, and the remaining provisions will remain in full force and effect.

Our failure to exercise or enforce any right or provision of these Terms is not a waiver of that right or provision.

These Terms, together with any applicable order terms and any applicable Service Agreement, constitute the entire agreement between you and the Company regarding use of the Service. The Privacy Notice describes how we process personal information and is acknowledged separately; it does not form part of the contractual entire agreement except where these Terms expressly incorporate a specific provision. No oral or written communication outside those documents modifies these Terms, except by an express agreement accepted by both parties.

EditorialXML is operated by Lynsoft LLC.

For questions about these Terms, or about an order, write to [email protected]. Please include your order or project reference so we can respond accurately.