Apply as an Aangus Researcher

Say where a number came from. Every figure you publish through Aangus carries its source dataset, the round or year, and the date you retrieved it. If a number comes from a press release rather than the dataset, say so.

Do not present provisional data as final. Where a source marks a round provisional, Aangus carries that mark into every chart it draws and every file it exports, and you carry it into your own tables and text.

Do not misrepresent a colleague's work. An output made by someone else keeps their name on it, whether you cite it, save it, or build on it.

Work with people, not on them. If your work involves human subjects, you are responsible for the approvals your own institution requires. Aangus does not grant ethics approval and does not stand in for one.

Aangus is a tool and not an author. It can draft, calculate and summarise. What you publish is yours, and checking it is yours.

An account that breaks this code can be suspended. A suspended account loses its access, and the credit on its work stays, because credit records what other people did with it.

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Every output made here carries an ID, the person who made it, the datasets behind it, and the query that produced it. That record is written automatically and cannot be edited off an output.

A credit is created when another member cites or saves your output. Saving keeps the original's ID and credit; the copy cannot be stripped of it.

An output records the person who made it. Where several people work on something, each output carries its own maker's name; Aangus does not divide credit between people, because a share is an opinion and a credit is a record.

You cannot give yourself a credit. A credit records that somebody else found your work worth using.

Outside Aangus, the terms require attribution. We do not claim to detect when that fails, and we say so rather than implying a check we do not run.

Leaving a project does not remove your credit from work already shared into it. Deleting your account does not either, because removing it would rewrite somebody else's study.

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You own what you write. Your chats, outputs, drafts and uploads are yours, and you can export all of it at any time, in a format you can open elsewhere.

Aangus may use de-identified work — the shape of a question, a method, an anonymised result — to run and improve Aangus, including training its own models. Your name, your affiliation and your unpublished findings are not part of that. It is never sold and never given to anyone outside Aangus, and it is never used to train a model for anyone else. This permission ends when you delete your account.

Datasets in the Aangus Library belong to their publishers. Their licences travel with them, and where a licence forbids redistribution, Export is switched off and Cite is offered instead.

Files you upload are private to you unless you attach them to a project or share them. A file is read in order to summarise it; a large file is summarised rather than loaded in full until you ask about it.

Papers you hold and upload stay in your own library. Aangus does not redistribute them and never fetches a paywalled PDF. Where a paper is behind a paywall you get the abstract and a link to the publisher.

You can connect accounts of your own, so Aangus can fetch on your behalf under your own terms. Today that is Zenodo, ORCID, Google Drive and GitHub. Dropbox, Figshare, Zotero, Mendeley and KoBoToolbox are not built yet, and the Library says which. Where a provider issues personal keys — DHS, ICPSR, ACLED — you supply your own, and it is used for you alone.

Nothing is fetched unless you choose it, one item at a time. Aangus asks Google only for the files you pick in Google's own chooser, so it cannot list or read the rest of your Drive.

Anything brought in carries where it came from, when, and the licence the provider states. Where that licence plainly allows redistribution, the copy may be exported and shared like anything else. Where the provider states no licence, or one Aangus does not recognise, the copy is yours alone: it stays in your library and cannot be shared, posted, added to a project or exported. Aangus never assumes an unstated licence is open.

The credentials themselves are encrypted before they are stored, and are never shown back to you or to anyone else. Disconnecting erases Aangus's copy at once and, where the provider accepts a revocation, tells them to forget the grant; Google and GitHub do, and ORCID and Zenodo have no way to be told. What you already brought in stays in your library, with its provenance.

Aangus never uses institutional subscription access. No library proxy, no shared credential, no account belonging to a university. A connection is yours, used for you, and used nowhere else.

A page fetched from a public URL carries whatever licence that page carries. Where the licence cannot be established, the copy is treated as personal-use-only rather than assumed to be open.

Nothing is stored because you looked at it. Search results, previews and fetched pages are held only when you choose to save them.

The research platform is separate from the Aangus Foundation's systems. Nothing you do here reaches a Scholar's record, and nothing from a Scholar's record reaches here.

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Aangus Research is operated by Aangus Corporation. Applying does not create an account with the Aangus Foundation, and the two hold separate records. Aangus is an initiative operated by its founders while the registration of Aangus Foundation (to be an Illinois not-for-profit corporation) and Aangus Corporation (to be a Delaware corporation) completes; no donations are accepted and none are tax-deductible until then.

A student applying with an address at a listed university is approved on proving that address. Every other application is read by a person. We may ask for more information, and we may decline; a person reads every decline, and if we decline we tell you why and how to reach us.

You are responsible for what you publish. Aangus provides data, tools and a model; it does not review or approve your findings.

Organizations commission work through Aangus. If you say you are open to paid projects, we may invite you to one. You can decline any invitation, and payment terms are agreed per project before you start.

You can delete your account. Outputs already shared into other people's projects stay there with your credit, because removing them would rewrite somebody else's work. A file you attach to a project stays with that project for the same reason, and the Library says so where you attach it. Everything else goes.

Work of yours that another member has already built on — an anonymised method or result folded into their output — stays part of their work, and Aangus may keep using that much. Deleting your account ends the permission for everything else.

We can suspend an account that breaks the code of conduct. A suspended account loses its access, and the credit on its work stays, because credit records what other people did with it.

Some data reaches you through third parties on their own terms, and using it means agreeing to those terms as well as these. Aangus uses the FRED® API from the Federal Reserve Bank of St. Louis: this product uses the FRED® API but is not endorsed or certified by the Federal Reserve Bank of St. Louis, and by using FRED data here you agree to the FRED API terms of use at https://fred.stlouisfed.org/docs/api/terms_of_use.html. Data from the UN Population Division and the UNDP Human Development Report Office is licensed CC BY 3.0 IGO and must carry its attribution wherever you reproduce it.

You can see every agreement you have given from My consents in your profile, and withdraw any of them except the credit and attribution rule. Credit records what other people did with your work, so it stays true whether or not you agree to it today.

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Aangus is a computer program, not a person and not a colleague. It drafts, calculates, searches and summarises. It does not review your work, approve your findings, or take responsibility for them.

A number drawn from a catalogue series carries a source line naming the dataset behind it. A number from the web carries a web marker naming the site. An answer from Aangus's own knowledge carries neither, and is marked as unverified. Treat an unverified number as unverified, and ask where it came from.

It searches the Aangus catalogue first and the open web second, and marks anything from the web as from the web. It draws a chart only from a series it holds, never from figures in the conversation, and the chart carries its source. A file it exports carries the source, licence and retrieval date inside it.

It can be wrong, and it can be confidently wrong. Check anything you intend to publish, the way you would check a research assistant's first draft.

In your own chat it can see your long-term memory, the open project's memory, the Aangus catalog, your library, and items other people have shared with you. It can also search the open web and read a page it found, or a link you give, unless you have asked for sources only. It cannot see anything else.

In a project it can see the project's brief and the files attached to the project's library, whoever attached them. It cannot read anybody's chat but your own, and it never quotes one member's unshared chat to another.

In a group it answers only when somebody writes @Aangus, and only from what that group can already see. Aangus is off in a new group until the group turns it on, and the group is told which state it is in.

In direct messages it does not take part at all.

For an organization it can see that organization's own projects and reports, and nothing belonging to anybody else.

It remembers things about you between chats: how you work, what you are working on, which data you use. You can read every remembered item, edit or delete any of them, pause remembering entirely, or delete the lot, from What Aangus remembers in your profile. An item you have not used for twelve months fades to the bottom of that page and can be restored.

Aangus runs on a general-purpose language model supplied by an external provider, reached through a single adapter so the provider can change without the product changing. Your chats are sent to that provider in order to produce an answer. They are not sold, and they are not used to train anybody else's model.

Aangus does not decide anything about you. A student at a listed university is approved on proving that address; every other application is scored to sort a queue and read by a person, and a person reads every decline. No approval, rejection or suspension is made by the model.

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