Research should begin
with clear terms.

Purpose of the Site

Research Idea is a public registry of potential university-level research ideas. It helps contributors phrase, classify, preserve and connect research directions. It is not a research supervisor, ethics committee, publisher, peer-review service, funding platform, recruitment forum or project-execution service.

An idea’s qualification score, provenance level or related-research signal is an automated registry assessment. It is not proof that the idea is novel, correct, safe, feasible, lawful or suitable for a particular degree. Researchers must conduct their own literature review and obtain appropriate academic supervision, permissions and ethics approval.

Acceptance and eligibility

By selecting “Accept terms and continue”, creating or using an account, submitting material, claiming an idea, adding a scholarly note, connecting research, or otherwise using the Site, you accept the version of these Terms then displayed.

You must have the legal capacity to accept these Terms. AI-assisted contribution tools are available only to people aged 18 or older. If you act for an institution or organisation, you confirm that you are authorised to bind it.

Accounts and public attribution

Reading, browsing by academic field and using filters are public. Searching requires authentication using a one-time email code because search uses limited AI capacity and needs protection from automated abuse. Search does not currently consume an AI credit. Contributing also requires authentication. The Site does not create or store passwords. You are responsible for keeping access to your email account secure.

Supabase processes authentication details and supplies the Site with a stable account identifier. Registry records transform that identifier into a protected contributor code. The registry displays this code while keeping your account email and profile name private. Do not put your identity or contact details in public content.

Your contributions

You remain responsible for ideas, limited source excerpts, scholarly notes, links, citations and other material you submit (“Contributions”). You confirm that your Contributions are accurate to the best of your knowledge, lawful, and do not infringe another person’s copyright, privacy, confidentiality or other rights.

Do not submit personal, confidential, proprietary, embargoed, restricted or sensitive information. For paper-derived ideas, submit only the limited passage reasonably necessary to identify the research direction, together with an accurate source and location. Do not bypass a paywall or provide material you are not entitled to use.

You retain any rights you hold in your Contributions. You grant the Operator a worldwide, non-exclusive, royalty-free licence to store, reproduce, format, classify, translate, academically rephrase, moderate, publicly display, distribute and preserve your Contributions, and to create and display the AI-assisted research brief and record history needed to operate and improve the registry. This licence continues while the Contribution remains in the registry and for reasonable backup, integrity and legal-retention periods.

Submitting an idea does not give you ownership of the underlying subject, prevent independent research by others, or create an exclusive reservation. Other people may study similar questions.

AI and automated decisions

The Site uses automated systems to improve natural-language search, edit wording, classify disciplines, assess registry readiness, verify source metadata, find related scholarly records and screen scholarly notes. There is no routine human moderation queue. Automated results can be incomplete, biased or wrong.

Natural-language searches and text submitted to the AI assistant are sent to Anthropic’s Claude service, and to Google Gemini as a backup when Claude is unavailable. Each provider handles inputs and outputs under its own terms for the service tier the Site uses; where those terms permit product improvement or human review, submitted material may be used in that way. Academic search terms may also be sent to services such as Crossref, Semantic Scholar and OpenAlex. Do not submit personal, sensitive, confidential, embargoed or proprietary information.

Admission uses a public quality score, published academic gates and a separate blind safeguard audit. The audit reports whether each safeguard passed; it does not present a model’s self-estimated confidence as fact. Provenance describes traceability, not merit. An original idea may qualify without citations, credentials, affiliation or academic support. For a claimed source, deterministic checks may confirm the DOI or match a non-DOI page’s title and author. If that check fails, the source claim is detached and the underlying idea may still be assessed on its own merits.

The Site may automatically admit, request revision of, or reject a Contribution. A high-confidence scholarly note may correct narrow classification metadata, but it may not overwrite the original contributor’s central research question or intent, and it never creates a new idea. A signed-in reader may challenge an idea’s inclusion. Public delisting requires two separate automated reviews to establish the same exceptional ground at the published threshold; disagreement, controversy, limited novelty, existing research, anonymity or weak provenance alone are not grounds. Delisted records and decision histories are preserved for integrity and possible restoration rather than permanently erased.

Research signals and connected outputs

Marking an idea as “being researched” is a public, non-exclusive signal. The Site does not collect a private study note. The signal creates no ownership, collaboration, supervision, funding or delivery obligation.

Completed research is connected through a lawful public DOI, repository or publication link. Research Idea does not accept a new copy of the research file, peer review or endorse the output, and may remove unsafe, unlawful, misleading or infringing links.

Scholarly notes

Scholarly notes must stay within the registry’s purpose: a focused correction, supporting source, classification suggestion, researchability or ethics concern, duplicate notice, clarification, distinct research direction, or specific challenge to an idea’s inclusion. They are not comments for general debate, replies, project execution, recruitment or promotion.

You may strongly criticise a research proposition but may not insult, harass or accuse its contributor. You may not edit another contributor’s original idea. Accepted notes remain attributed, and automated screening may reject material that falls outside the Site’s purpose.

Prohibited use

You may not use the Site to submit or distribute unlawful, deceptive, defamatory, abusive, discriminatory, harassing, privacy-invasive or infringing content; personal accusations; spam or advertising disguised as research; malware; fabricated citations or evidence; instructions intended to manipulate the automated systems; or content that predetermines a conclusion while presenting itself as neutral research.

You may not impersonate another person, compromise accounts, probe security, disrupt the Site, evade limits, or make automated requests at a rate that degrades the service. Reasonable scholarly indexing and research use are welcome; high-volume or commercial reuse requires prior permission unless a published licence or API expressly permits it.

Copyright complaints and takedown

If you believe public material on the Site infringes your copyright or another legal right, use the process in the Copyright and Takedown Policy. A valid notice should identify the protected work, the specific Research Idea URL, the rights holder, the basis of the complaint, and reliable contact details.

The Operator may restrict access while a good-faith complaint is assessed, ask for supporting information, notify the contributor, preserve necessary evidence, remove unlawful material, and act against repeated infringement. Knowingly false or abusive notices are prohibited.

AI credits, payments and support

Signed-in accounts receive five free AI credits each week. The allowance resets on Monday at 00:00 South African time and does not roll over. The Operator account may have unlimited access for building and testing. One credit is used only when an eligible automated action returns a result; service failures and timeouts do not intentionally consume a credit.

A once-off student pack adds 100 paid credits at the total rand price displayed before payment. It is not a subscription. Free credits are used first. Paid grants stack, the earliest-expiring grant is used first, and each grant expires three years after purchase. Credits are tied to the purchasing account, are not transferable, have no cash value, and do not affect an idea’s admission, score, provenance, placement or visibility.

PayFast provides the payment page and processes payment details using its security controls. You can review the description, price and these Terms, or abandon checkout, before confirming payment with PayFast. By continuing to payment, you ask the Site to begin supplying the digital service as soon as PayFast confirms successful payment. Credits are normally added automatically after that confirmation; if confirmation is delayed, they will be added when the verified notice arrives.

You may cancel before confirming payment. After supply begins, purchases are generally final, but this does not limit any cancellation, refund or other right that applicable law gives you. Contact the Operator promptly if credits were not supplied or a payment was duplicate, unauthorised or made in error. Any refund legally due will be made within the period required by law. Where the Operator agrees to a voluntary refund that the law does not require, it may return the amount after deducting payment-processing fees that were actually charged and not refunded by the payment provider. The Operator does not apply that deduction where the refund arises from its own error or a failure to supply purchased credits. Voluntary “Support the Registry” payments grant no credits, tax deduction, preferential treatment or other benefit.

Privacy and data handling

The Site is designed to minimise personal information. Supabase retains the authentication account needed for passwordless access, while the registry database stores a protected contributor code instead of the raw sign-in email. The Site has no public user profiles, behavioural analytics or advertising cookies. It keeps limited anonymous review totals by academic field, source type, outcome, failed gate and manipulation flag to monitor whether the published standard behaves fairly. These totals do not contain contributor codes, raw drafts or account identifiers. Contributions, public citations, payment records, provider logs and automated services still involve some processing. Service providers may process information outside South Africa. Further details appear in the Privacy Notice.

Where the Protection of Personal Information Act 4 of 2013 (“POPIA”) applies, you may request access to, correction or deletion of eligible personal information, object to certain processing, or complain to South Africa’s Information Regulator. Public scholarly records may be retained where necessary for attribution, freedom of expression, research integrity, legal obligations or the rights of others.

If advertising or non-essential analytics are introduced, the Site will first reassess the data model and provide the additional disclosures and choices required at that time.

Intellectual property

The Site’s branding, design, software, editorial framework and compilation are owned by or licensed to the Operator. Third-party publications, metadata, names and links remain subject to their respective rights and terms. Except for the licence you grant above, these Terms do not transfer ownership between you and the Operator.

Availability, changes and enforcement

We may change, suspend or discontinue features; impose fair-use or AI limits; correct technical errors; reject or remove Contributions; restrict accounts; or preserve evidence of misuse where reasonably necessary to protect the registry, users or legal rights.

We may update these Terms. When a material change is made, the Site may require acceptance of a new version before further use. The effective date and version appear at the top of this page.

Disclaimers, liability and indemnity

The Site is provided “as is” and “as available”. To the fullest extent permitted by law, the Operator does not warrant uninterrupted availability, accuracy, completeness, fitness for a particular purpose, non-infringement, publication, indexing, research novelty or any academic outcome.

To the fullest extent permitted by law, the Operator is not liable for indirect, incidental, special or consequential loss arising from use of the Site, reliance on an idea or automated output, research undertaken, unavailable services, loss of data, or third-party content. To the fullest extent permitted by law, the Operator’s total liability to you for all claims connected with the Site or these Terms is limited to the greater of the total amount you paid to the Operator in the twelve months before the event giving rise to the claim, or five hundred rand (R500). Nothing in these Terms excludes or limits liability or rights that cannot lawfully be excluded or limited, including applicable consumer and data-protection rights.

To the fullest extent permitted by law, you agree to indemnify the Operator and its directors, employees and service providers against reasonable claims, damages, losses and costs that arise from your Contributions, your use of the Site, or your breach of these Terms, including any claim that your Contribution infringes another person’s copyright, privacy, confidentiality or other rights. The Operator will give you reasonable notice of a relevant claim and a fair opportunity to take part in its handling, and this indemnity is subject to any limit that applicable consumer law places on it.

Governing law

These Terms are governed by the laws of the Republic of South Africa, without excluding mandatory protections that apply where you live. The parties will first attempt to resolve a dispute in good faith before approaching a court or other competent forum.

Operator and consumer contact

The Site is operated by BDF Partners (Pty) Ltd, registration number 2025/857305/07, a company registered in the Republic of South Africa and trading as Research Idea (formerly Research Idea Registry). Its website address is researchidea.org. Legal, privacy, copyright, payment, refund and service enquiries may be sent through the operator contact page. Please include the relevant account email and PayFast payment reference for a private payment enquiry, but do not place them in a public research record.

The Operator will first try to resolve a consumer complaint directly. Its full particulars, including a physical address and telephone number, appear on the purchase terms and supplier details page, which is shown to any signed-in reader and is available before a purchase is confirmed. Nothing in these Terms prevents a consumer from approaching the National Consumer Commission, the Information Regulator, a competent ombud or a court where entitled to do so.