Terms of Use
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Content Rights and Licensing
Except where otherwise noted, Writing Studies Tree (WST) code and content is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution-NonCommercial 3.0 Unported License. WST does not assert copyright or any proprietary rights over the facts contained in the WST database. Facts are not copyrightable in the U.S. (see Feist Publications v. Rural Telephone Service). WST does assert proprietary rights over original aspects of its compilation of those facts, including semantic relations between them and visualizations of them.
The Terms of Service appearing on this page are adapted with permission from Phylo, and are licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution-Noncommercial-Share Alike 3.0 United States License.
By contributing content to WST, you certify that it is within your rights under U.S. Copyright law and other applicable regulations to provide that content. By contributing original content to WST, you authorize WST to prepare derivative works based on it (including, but not limited to, visualizations of associated data and its connections with other data) and distribute original and derivative works under the terms of our Creative Commons license. You retain ownership of contributed original content.
WST may display some copyrighted material in accordance with fair use as provided for by U.S. Copyright law (see §107). This material is distributed without profit to those who have expressed a prior interest in receiving the included information for research and educational purposes. Where possible, attribution to the original source has been included. If you wish to use copyrighted material for purposes of your own that go beyond fair use, you must obtain permission from the copyright holder.
If you are a copyright holder and believe any WST content infringes on your rights, you may submit a notice pursuant to the Digital Millennium Copyright Act in writing to admin@writingstudiestree.org with the information listed in 17 U.S.C 512(c)(3). If you believe one of your submissions has been removed in error, you may file a counter-notice under the terms of 17 U.S.C. 512(g). WST may send your counter-notice to the original complainant. Unless the copyright holder files an action seeking a court order against WST or the contributor, the removed content may be replaced within 10 to 14 days at WST's sole discretion.
Third-party resources
Some links on our site may take you to third-party resources. While we do our best to combat spam, and will endeavor to ensure that these links refer to materials relevant to their referring pages, WST is not responsible for the privacy or copyright policies of these sites or how they treat user information.
Privacy Policy
WST values your participation, both as a visitor to the site and as a contributor of information, and your privacy is important to us. WST adheres to a strict policy for ensuring the privacy of your personally identifiable information (PII), such as your email address, phone number, and other identifiable information.
Public information
The WST database may contain publicly available information about you, including your full name, teaching appointments, publications, date of birth, and other professional activities.
Contact information
When a visitor requests a user account, we ask for verification from a working email address (or other means as determined by administrators) before the account can be used. You have the option to enable a “personal contact form” which allows other registered site users to generate a message to this email address; whether or not this option is enabled, however, the email address you provide will never be visible except to site administrators.
We discourage users from posting other forms of direct contact information on the site, such as phone numbers or mailing addresses, including of offices at universities. If we become aware that our database contains this information, we will remove it immediately.
Email communications
If you contribute information to WST, we may contact you regarding that information (e.g. to verify a source). We may also send occasional updates regarding new functionality added to the site, especially if these updates will affect communication policy. We will never give your email address to a third party, including to other non-administrator users of WST.
Cookies
WST places an industry-standard "cookie" file on your computer to track activity on our websites, e.g. to verify that you are logged in. This cookie is totally anonymous and does not store PII about individual users. You can choose to have the cookie store your username and password or to type them in each time you visit one of our sites.
Under 18
WST does not knowingly collect PII from or about people under the age of 18. If we become aware that our database contains this information, we will remove it immediately.
Third-party resources
WST contains links to other websites, some of which may not follow the same privacy policies as WST. We are not responsible for the privacy policies of these sites or how they treat user information.
Spam protection
In order to protect our site and its legitimate users, the WST has installed third-party anti-spam software (Mollom). When you contribute information to our site, including forum posts, you accept that your message and other personal details about you will be analyzed and stored temporarily for anti-spam and quality monitoring purposes, in accordance with Mollom's privacy policy.
Law enforcement compliance
In the event of criminal activity or vandalism, we reserve the right to disclose personal data, including IP addresses, to authorized law enforcement personnel.
Changes to privacy policy
WST will never use PII in new, unanticipated ways not previously discussed in our privacy notice without notifying users. All changes to WST's privacy policy will be posted on this page. We will attempt to notify you of these changes and provide you with an opportunity to opt out of them.
Accuracy of Information
We encourage all contributors to the WST database to reference one or more sources when adding or editing information. That said, WST cannot guarantee the accuracy of these sources or of information without sources. Years of faculty appointments, in particular, are likely to be approximate. If you see something you know to be false, we encourage you to correct the information and add appropriate reference to your own sources.
If you have questions about WST's terms of service or privacy policy, please contact us at admin@writingstudiestree.org.