Read critically. Judge independently.

1. Agreement to these terms

These Terms of Use ("Terms") are an agreement between you and Rounds ("Rounds," "we," "us," or "our") governing your access to the Rounds iOS app, Share Extension, website, and related services (collectively, the "Service").

By creating an account or using the Service, you agree to these Terms and our Privacy Policy. If you do not agree, do not use the Service.

2. What Rounds provides

Rounds helps orthopaedic professionals discover literature, view evidence-priority signals, resolve article links through open-access or institutional pathways, save references locally, and keep local notes.

The Service may change as sources, publishers, institutions, laws, and product requirements change. Features may be added, limited, suspended, or removed.

3. Eligibility and accounts

• You must be at least 18 and legally capable of agreeing to these Terms.
• You must provide accurate account information and keep your sign-in methods secure.
• You may not share passwords, verification codes, session tokens, or institutional credentials.
• You are responsible for activity performed through your account unless you promptly report unauthorized use.
• Profession and institution fields are self-reported unless the Service explicitly labels them as verified. Do not misrepresent credentials, affiliation, training, or authority.

Administrative status and subscription tier are assigned only by Rounds and do not establish professional credentials.

4. Educational use only — no medical advice

You are responsible for verifying accuracy, currency, applicability, conflicts, retractions, corrections, local standards, patient factors, and licensing requirements before relying on any information.

The Service is not designed for emergencies or time-critical clinical communication.

5. Institutional and publisher access

Rounds can direct you to publishers, open-access files, or your selected institution’s access system. Rounds does not grant a subscription, copyright licence, or right to obtain content beyond the rights provided by the publisher, author, institution, or applicable law.

• Use institutional access only if you are authorized under your institution’s terms.
• Do not automate bulk downloads, scrape publishers, evade access controls, or share proxy access.
• Publisher and institutional availability may change without notice.
• Rounds never prefetches or stores paywalled PDFs. Open-access PDFs may be temporarily cached.

When you download a PDF through the Files picker, you choose where it is stored and are responsible for using it lawfully. Deleting the Rounds reference does not delete your file.

6. What you submit

Rounds has no comments, replies, or member-to-member messaging. There is no member-visible content, so nothing you send is published to anyone.

What you can send us is narrow: a paper report (the article’s DOI and title, a reason chosen from a fixed list, and a diagnostic reference — there is no free-text box), and the optional feedback answers you choose to give. You grant Rounds a non-exclusive, worldwide, royalty-free licence to store and use those submissions only as needed to operate, secure, and improve the Service.

Your notes stay on your device and are never sent to Rounds. Downloaded PDFs are saved into your own Files storage, not ours.

Never submit patient-identifying information, confidential institutional information, or another person’s personal information. Reports are reviewed by a Rounds administrator; we aim to look at them within two business days.

7. Acceptable use

You must not:

• break the law, infringe rights, or encourage unlawful conduct;
• harass, threaten, impersonate, deceive, discriminate against, or expose another person;
• submit patient identifiers, passwords, access tokens, private keys, malware, or spam;
• interfere with security, rate limits, authentication, moderation, or service availability;
• reverse engineer or probe the Service except where applicable law expressly permits it;
• use automated means to create accounts, post content, report users, or extract data without written permission;
• use Rounds or its outputs to train a competing model or service without written permission; or
• misrepresent the source, strength, endorsement, or clinical meaning of a Rounds Evidence Score.

8. Rounds intellectual property

The Service, brand, interface, taxonomy, scoring presentation, software, and original editorial material are owned by or licensed to Rounds and protected by applicable intellectual-property laws. Article metadata, abstracts, publisher content, and third-party marks remain the property of their respective owners.

Subject to these Terms, Rounds gives you a limited, personal, revocable, non-exclusive, non-transferable licence to use the Service for professional educational purposes.

Feedback you voluntarily provide may be used to improve the Service without obligation to compensate you, provided we handle personal information under the Privacy Policy.

9. Third-party services and links

The Service depends on external identity providers, libraries, publishers, metadata sources, hosting providers, and websites. Their terms and privacy practices apply to their services. Rounds does not control and is not responsible for third-party availability, content, security, or decisions.

A link, score, citation, or inclusion in a digest is not an endorsement of an author, journal, institution, product, procedure, or conclusion.

10. Suspension, termination, and deletion

You may stop using Rounds or permanently delete your account in the app at any time. We may restrict, suspend, or terminate access when reasonably necessary to protect users, institutions, publishers, the Service, or legal rights; investigate misconduct; enforce these Terms; or comply with law.

Where appropriate, enforcement may begin with a warning, content hold, removal, or feature restriction. Serious or repeated violations may result in immediate suspension or termination.

Sections that by their nature should survive termination—including ownership, disclaimers, limitations, and general legal terms—continue to apply.

11. Disclaimers and limitation of liability

To the maximum extent permitted by law, the Service is provided “as is” and “as available.” Rounds does not guarantee uninterrupted availability, complete coverage, successful full-text access, error-free metadata, or that scores, summaries, notices, or links are accurate, complete, or current.

To the maximum extent permitted by law, Rounds and its operators will not be liable for indirect, incidental, special, consequential, exemplary, or punitive damages; loss of data, access, revenue, or opportunity; or clinical, professional, institutional, or publisher decisions arising from use of or inability to use the Service.

Nothing in these Terms excludes liability that cannot legally be excluded. Consumer-protection rights that apply to you are not waived.

12. General terms

Changes

We may update these Terms. Material changes will be communicated through the Service or another reasonable channel. Continued use after the effective date means you accept the updated Terms.

Governing law

These Terms are governed by the laws of Ontario and the federal laws of Canada applicable there, without regard to conflict-of-law rules. Courts located in Ontario will have jurisdiction, subject to rights you may have under mandatory local law.

Severability and waiver

If a provision is unenforceable, the remaining provisions continue in effect. Failure to enforce a provision is not a waiver.

Assignment

You may not assign these Terms without our consent. Rounds may assign them as part of a reorganization, financing, merger, acquisition, or transfer of the Service.

Entire agreement

These Terms and the Privacy Policy are the entire agreement concerning the Service unless another written agreement expressly applies.