Data policy for the Research Library
Who owns what, what Aangus may keep, and what happens to files you upload or fetch through your own accounts.
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 Your name, your affiliation and your unpublished findings are not part of that.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.