Terms of Service

Last updated: 9 June 2026 · covers Solas Chrome extension v1.11.0

These Terms of Service (“Terms”) govern your use of Solas (the “Service”), comprising the Chrome browser extension, the Site at solastool.com, and Solas for Institutions. By installing the Extension or using the Site, you agree to these Terms. If you do not agree, please uninstall the extension.

The short version Solas is a free research-preview tool. We build it carefully, but we don’t guarantee every citation is correct for every academic context — you remain responsible for what you submit. Don’t use Solas to commit academic misconduct. Don’t reverse-engineer the bits we’d rather you didn’t. We’re based in England and English law applies.

1. Who can use Solas

Solas is available to anyone aged 13 or over with a compatible version of Google Chrome. It is intended for higher-education students, academic researchers, and academic staff. You are responsible for ensuring your use of Solas complies with the academic integrity rules of your institution.

2. What Solas does and does not promise

Solas automates the formatting of citations using metadata available on the pages you choose to cite. It also evaluates source reliability and checks that cited sources exist in academic registries. While we work hard to make the output accurate, no automated tool can guarantee a citation, a reliability verdict, or an existence check is correct for every academic context.

You remain responsible for reviewing every citation, every reliability verdict, and every integrity flag before submitting work as part of your academic studies or publishing it under your name.

Solas is provided “as is”, without warranty of any kind, express or implied. We are not liable for marks lost, work delayed, or any other loss arising from your use of Solas.

3. Pricing and the research preview

The current Solas extension is provided free of charge as a research preview. The full feature set — citation engine, library, source reliability, Citation Integrity verification, and the Audit tab — is available at no cost.

Solas may, in future, introduce paid features for individual users. Pricing, scope, and availability of any future paid features will be communicated through the extension and on the Site before any charge applies. Use of the free research preview will never be retroactively charged for.

3.1 Solas for Institutions

Solas for Institutions is a paid offering separate from the free Extension. Institutions licence the product per-student per-year under a separate written agreement, including a Data Processing Agreement. Pricing and terms are set out at solastool.com/institutions and confirmed in the institutional licence agreement.

Use of the free Extension is not affected by whether or not your institution has an institutional licence. You may use Solas without ever linking your install to an institution.

4. Acceptable use

You agree not to:

  1. Use Solas to commit, facilitate, or conceal academic misconduct, including the deliberate use of fabricated or AI-generated references in submitted work.
  2. Reverse-engineer, decompile, or attempt to extract the source code of the Service beyond what is permitted by applicable law.
  3. Resell, sublicense, or otherwise commercially distribute Solas or any substantial portion of its functionality.
  4. Use automated means (bots, scrapers, scripts) to interact with the Service at scale.
  5. Use Solas in a way that infringes the intellectual property rights of others.
  6. Attempt to bypass the Service’s rate limits, security controls, or institutional opt-in flow.

5. Intellectual property

Solas, the name “Solas”, and all associated source code, design, branding, and documentation are the property of Thomas Mulvany. A separate proprietary licence accompanies the extension; see the LICENSE file shipped with the Software.

You retain all rights to the citations you create and the content you author. Solas claims no ownership over the references stored in your local library or over any text you paste into the Audit tab.

6. Privacy

Our handling of personal data is described in our Privacy Policy. By using Solas, you also agree to that policy.

7. Third-party services

Solas uses several third-party services to function (Cloudflare, OpenAI, CrossRef, OpenAlex, Google Books, Unpaywall, Companies House). These are listed in the Privacy Policy. Your use of Solas implies acceptance that these services may be queried in the course of building or verifying a citation.

8. AI-assisted features

Solas uses large-language-model (LLM) inference, via OpenAI, to extract citation metadata when local parsers cannot. The model returns structured fields the Extension uses to build the reference.

LLM outputs can be inaccurate or fabricated. Solas’s Citation Integrity feature is designed to detect AI-fabricated references regardless of who or what generated them, including its own AI extraction pipeline. The same review responsibility set out in §2 applies.

9. Changes to the Service

We may modify, add, or remove features of Solas at any time. We will give reasonable notice (via the extension, the Site, or by email where applicable) of material changes that affect functionality you rely on. For Solas for Institutions, material change notice is governed by the institutional licence agreement.

10. Termination

You may stop using Solas at any time by uninstalling the extension. Your locally-stored Library is deleted from your machine when you uninstall.

We may suspend or terminate access for users who breach these Terms, with notice where reasonably possible.

11. Liability

To the maximum extent permitted by law, our total liability to you in connection with Solas is limited to the amount you have paid us in the twelve months preceding the event giving rise to the claim. For users of the free research preview, who have paid nothing, this means our liability is correspondingly bounded.

We are not liable for indirect, incidental, or consequential losses, including loss of academic marks, employment opportunities, or data.

Nothing in these Terms limits or excludes our liability for death or personal injury caused by our negligence, fraud, or any other liability that cannot lawfully be excluded.

12. Governing law

These Terms are governed by the laws of England and Wales. Any disputes will be subject to the exclusive jurisdiction of the courts of England and Wales.

13. Independence

Solas is an independent product. It is not affiliated with, endorsed by, or sponsored by any university, publisher, registry, or referencing-guide author. References to academic registries (CrossRef, OpenAlex, Google Books, and others) describe the public APIs Solas queries to verify citations; they do not imply any partnership.

14. Contact

For questions about these Terms:
General & student support: support@solastool.com
Institutional / procurement: institutions@solastool.com

If anything in these Terms is unclear, email us — we’d rather rewrite a clause than have you sign something you don’t understand.