Terms of Service

These terms cover your use of SOSX®, the web application and the services we provide with it. They sit alongside our privacy notice, which explains how we handle personal data. If your organisation has signed an agreement or order form with us for SOSX, that agreement takes precedence over these terms where the two differ.

1. Who we are

SOSX is provided by Digital Tactics Ltd, a company registered in England and Wales with company number 07666910, whose address is 5 Boundary Road, Hove BN3 4EH, United Kingdom ("we", "us", "our"). In these terms "you" means the person using SOSX and, where you use it for your organisation, that organisation too.

SOSX is offered to businesses, organisations and professionals, including researchers, for use in their work. It is not offered to consumers. You must be 18 or over to hold an account.

2. Accounts and trials

2.1 You keep your sign-in details to yourself and tell us straight away at [email protected] if you think someone else has used your account. You are responsible for what is done through your account until you tell us.

2.2 Trials are for attendees of the conferences and events where we exhibit, through a code or a sign-up link given to them there. A trial gives you 30 days' access to your own SOSX workspace, counted from when the workspace is set up. Each code can be redeemed once, has no cash value and is not for resale. A trial costs nothing, asks for no payment details, and does not roll over into a paid plan.

2.3 While we are managing sign-ups, we activate a trial within 7 business days of receiving your details, and we email you when your workspace is ready.

2.4 If you take up a paid plan, the order form or agreement for it sets out what you pay, for how long, and how it renews or ends.

3. Your content

"Your content" is everything you or your colleagues put into SOSX: the questions you ask, the files you upload, the documents and data you bring, and the networks, analyses and reports SOSX builds for you from them.

3.1 You own your content. We claim no ownership of it, and nothing in these terms transfers any of your rights to us. Reports and other outputs SOSX produces for you are yours to use, subject to the rights of others in any third-party material they quote or cite (see section 5).

3.2 The licence you give us is narrow. You allow us to store, copy, process, analyse, display and transmit your content only as needed to run SOSX for you: to provide the features you use, to keep your content safe and backed up, to give you support when you ask for it, and to meet our legal obligations. The licence ends when your content is deleted, apart from backups, which age out on the schedule in section 10.

3.3 We do not train AI models on your content. SOSX does not train AI models, and we do not use your content to train or fine-tune any model, ours or anyone else's. If that were ever to change, we would ask for your consent first, and you could say no without losing anything you have now. The AI model providers that process your content on our behalf do so under business terms that do not allow them to train on it, and work in a confidential workspace goes only by a zero-retention route (see 3.5).

3.4 Your organisation's content is kept apart. Each organisation's content is held in its own storage, separate from other organisations'. Files you upload to SOSX are never added to the shared catalogue of public scholarly records that SOSX keeps for all its users.

3.5 Confidential workspaces. Where your edition offers one, you can create a confidential workspace for sensitive material such as an unpublished manuscript. A workspace is set as confidential when it is created and stays so. Only its author can open it. Administrators in your organisation cannot. Our staff can open it only under a written, time-limited and logged emergency-access grant, approved by a second member of staff, and only at your request or where the law requires it. We will tell you when such access is used, unless the law forbids that. AI work in a confidential workspace goes only by a zero-retention route, and if that route is unavailable the work is refused rather than sent another way. The source file and its extracted text are deleted 24 hours after extraction, derived outputs after 30 days or sooner if you ask, and deletion ends with a signed deletion receipt.

4. Copyright in what you bring

4.1 You confirm you have the right to use what you upload. By uploading or importing anything into SOSX, you confirm that you own it, or that you have the permission, licence or legal right to upload it and to have SOSX process it in the ways you ask. That includes papers, reports, data rooms, datasets and documents written by others. A paper you can read through a journal subscription or your institution's library, for example, may come with licence terms that limit what you may do with it; checking those terms is your responsibility.

4.2 Research and analysis use is your responsibility. UK law and many publisher licences allow some uses of copyright works for research, text and data analysis, criticism, review and quotation, each with its own conditions. Whether your use falls within them depends on your circumstances and your licences, and is for you to judge. We can't give you legal advice on it.

4.3 Sharing is your choice and your responsibility. Content you upload starts private to you. SOSX lets you share files and networks with colleagues in your organisation, and some features let you share or publish beyond it. When you share or publish anything, you are responsible for having the right to do so: a licence that lets you read a paper may not let you pass it on. Confidential workspaces cannot be published.

4.4 If you break these rules. If content you upload infringes someone else's rights, you are responsible for that. You agree to make good our reasonable losses and costs arising from a claim by a third party that content you uploaded or shared infringes their rights or breaks the law, to the extent the claim is caused by your breach of these terms.

5. Sources and citations

5.1 SOSX finds, catalogues and cites the sources behind its findings, and links to them, so that you can check every claim against where it came from.

5.2 Citing or linking to a work does not give you, or us, any rights in it. The authors and publishers of third-party works keep their rights, and your use of those works is governed by their licences and the law.

5.3 SOSX uses short excerpts of third-party works only to cite, quote, summarise and analyse them for you. It stores the full text of a public work in its shared catalogue only where the work's licence allows that (for example, Creative Commons licences such as CC BY), and it uses publishers' abstracts only within your own review.

5.4 Sources found on the open web and through scholarly databases are provided by third parties. We do not control them and are not responsible for their accuracy, availability or content.

6. Copyright complaints

6.1 How to tell us. If you believe content held in or made available through SOSX infringes your copyright or other rights, write to us at [email protected] with "Copyright notice" as the subject line, or by post to the address in section 1. Please include:

your name and contact details, and, if you act for the rights holder, who they are;
the work you say is infringed;
where the material is, in enough detail for us to find it (a link, a network or report name, or a screenshot);
why you believe the use is not authorised by you, your agent or the law; and
a statement that the information in your notice is accurate and that you are the rights holder or authorised to act for them.

6.2 What we do. We acknowledge your notice within 5 working days, review it promptly, and where it appears well founded we remove or disable access to the material. We tell the user concerned, give them a copy of the notice (we may withhold your personal contact details if you ask), and explain how to respond. We may act while a dispute is unresolved.

6.3 Counter-notice. If your content was removed and you believe that was a mistake, or that you have the right to use it, write to us at the same address with your reasons. We will consider what you send and pass it to the person who complained. If, after 10 working days, they have not told us that they have started legal proceedings about the material, we may restore it.

6.4 Repeat infringement. We may suspend or close the account of anyone who repeatedly infringes others' rights, or whose content is the subject of repeated, well-founded complaints.

6.5 Misuse of this process. Please don't send a notice or counter-notice you know to be untrue. We may refuse notices that are incomplete or plainly made in bad faith.

7. Our content and the SOSX trade mark

7.1 SOSX®, the software, its design, our books, films, guides, help content and this website belong to Digital Tactics Ltd or our licensors. Using SOSX gives you a non-exclusive, non-transferable right to use them for the purposes SOSX is offered for, while your account is open, and no other rights.

7.2 SOSX® is a registered trade mark of Digital Tactics Ltd. Please don't use it, or anything confusingly similar, for your own products or in a way that suggests we endorse you, without our written permission. You are welcome to refer to SOSX by name to describe it accurately.

7.3 Each copy of a book we send you is individually marked and is for your own use. Please don't copy it or pass it on beyond what the law allows.

7.4 If you send us ideas or feedback about SOSX, we may use them freely to improve SOSX, without owing you anything for them.

8. AI outputs

8.1 SOSX uses AI, alongside deterministic analysis, to research, map and analyse. You are working with an AI system, and its outputs can be incomplete or wrong.

8.2 SOSX cites the source of every claim it makes so that you can check it. Check before you rely. Review outputs, follow the citations, and apply your own judgement before you act on anything SOSX produces. A person stays in the chair: decisions are yours, not SOSX's.

8.3 Do not use SOSX outputs as the only basis for a decision with a significant effect on a person, or for a safety-critical decision, without independent review by someone qualified to make it.

8.4 Where you publish work that SOSX helped with, you are responsible for any disclosure of AI use that your publisher, funder, employer or institution requires. SOSX can give you a record of the AI work done in a workspace to help with that.

9. Acceptable use

You agree to use SOSX lawfully and for its intended purposes: systems analysis, research, planning and decision support. In particular, you must not use SOSX:

to design, plan or improve weapons or other instruments of harm, other than authorised defence research;
to find vulnerabilities in, or ways to attack or disrupt, critical infrastructure or any other system;
to design or improve surveillance intended for unlawful or mass monitoring of people;
to develop malware, phishing or other cyber attack tools;
to upload or share content you have no right to, or that infringes anyone's rights (sections 4 and 6);
to process personal data beyond what you need and are lawfully allowed to process;
to process classified or export-controlled data without your organisation's approval and our written agreement;
to get around, disable or test SOSX's security, access or data-protection controls, or to access anyone else's content;
to overload SOSX, or to scrape or harvest it by automated means; or
to resell or provide SOSX to others without our agreement.

SOSX monitors for misuse, for example unusual volumes of queries and research into prohibited topics, and may warn, block a request, or suspend an account. This section gives the key points of our Acceptable Use Policy; the full policy is available on request from [email protected].

10. Exporting and deleting your content

10.1 Export. You can export your work from SOSX in standard formats, including PDF, Word, PowerPoint, Excel, CSV, JSON and SysML v2, at any time while your account is open. Exports are checked against the confidential sources you register, so that terms you have marked as confidential are removed before a file leaves SOSX.

10.2 Deletion. You can delete files and networks you own. When you close your account, your plan ends, or a trial ends without moving to a paid plan, we delete your workspace content within 30 days; until then you can ask us for an export. Deleted content may remain in our backups until they age out, within a further 35 days. We keep billing records for 6 years, as UK tax law requires.

10.3 Deletion receipts. For a confidential workspace, deletion ends with a signed deletion receipt that records what was deleted and the date by which every backup will have aged out.

11. Availability, changes and support

11.1 We work to keep SOSX available and secure, but we don't promise that it will be uninterrupted or free of errors. We may take it offline for maintenance or security, giving notice where we can.

11.2 SOSX develops quickly. We may add, change or remove features. If we remove a feature you rely on, or stop offering SOSX altogether, we will give you at least 30 days' notice so that you can export your content, and refund anything you have paid in advance for a service you will not receive.

11.3 Help is at [email protected] and sosx.ai/support.

12. Suspension and termination

12.1 You can stop using SOSX and close your account at any time.

12.2 We may suspend or close your account, or remove content, straight away if you seriously or repeatedly break these terms, if your use puts SOSX, other users or anyone else at risk, or if the law requires it. Where it is reasonable, we will tell you first and give you a chance to put things right. If we end a paid service for any other reason, we will give you at least 30 days' notice, the export period in section 10, and a refund of anything paid in advance for the time remaining.

12.3 Sections 3.1, 4.4, 5.2, 7, 13 and 15 continue after your account ends.

13. Our liability

13.1 Nothing in these terms limits or excludes liability for death or personal injury caused by negligence, for fraud or fraudulent misrepresentation, or for anything else that cannot lawfully be limited or excluded.

13.2 Subject to 13.1, we are not liable for loss of profit, revenue, business, contracts or goodwill, or for any indirect or consequential loss.

13.3 Subject to 13.1, our total liability to you in any 12-month period, for anything arising from these terms or SOSX, is limited to the fees you paid us for SOSX in that period, or £100 where you paid nothing, for example during a trial.

13.4 SOSX is a tool for analysis and decision support. We are not responsible for decisions you or others make using its outputs (see section 8), or for the content of third-party sources (see section 5).

13.5 Keep your own copies of anything that matters to you. We back up SOSX, but export is your safeguard against loss.

14. Changes to these terms

We may update these terms. We will post the new version here with its date, and for a change that materially affects you we will email you at least 30 days before it takes effect. If you do not agree to a change, you can close your account and export your content before it takes effect. A change we must make for legal or security reasons may take effect sooner.

15. General

15.1 These terms, and any dispute or claim arising from them or SOSX (including non-contractual disputes), are governed by the law of England and Wales, and the courts of England and Wales have exclusive jurisdiction.

15.2 If any part of these terms is found unenforceable, the rest still applies. If we don't enforce a right straight away, we can still enforce it later.

15.3 You may not transfer your rights under these terms without our agreement. We may transfer ours to a company that takes over SOSX, and your rights will not be reduced as a result.

15.4 No one other than you and us has any right to enforce these terms.

16. Contact

Write to us at [email protected], or at Digital Tactics Ltd, 5 Boundary Road, Hove BN3 4EH, United Kingdom.

Last updated 6 October 2026.