Terms of participation

1. What these terms cover

These terms of participation (“Terms”) apply to everyone who uses the website leidendeclaration.ai and, in particular, to anyone who signs the declaration or posts a comment. The site is operated by the data controllers named in our privacy notice (currently Johannes Schmitt and Bartosz Naskręcki, in personal capacities, pending formation of a legal entity).

The Terms are a contract between you and the project. The privacy notice complements them; where the two overlap, both apply.

2. Who can sign

Anyone aged 16 or over is welcome to sign, regardless of profession or institutional affiliation. The “Affiliation or background” field is optional and open-ended: academics, teachers, students, engineers, retired researchers, independent practitioners, and people from non-academic backgrounds are all welcome. You may sign only as yourself; you may not sign on behalf of another person, a group, or an institution.

Organisations may not sign as organisations through the signing form. Curated organisational endorsements may be displayed separately when organizers have permission to publish them; those endorsements are not signatures and are not counted in the signatory list.

3. What signing means

When you submit a signature, you are stating publicly that you support the declaration text shown on this website at the time you sign. You also:

• Consent to the public display of your name, your optional affiliation or background (which, on the ORCID path, we may pre-fill from the most recent public affiliation on your ORCID profile), the fact that you authenticated (with a verified ORCID iD and/or an institutional email), and any optional comment once approved.
• Confirm that the information you have entered is accurate and that you are the person named.
• Acknowledge that affiliations on the site identify signatories and do not imply endorsement by any named institution, funder, or employer.
• Agree not to use a signature as a vehicle for advertising, for self-promotion beyond the comment word limit, or to make claims about other people.

The signing form asks you to tick three checkboxes before submitting: (a) consent to the public display of your name, optional affiliation or background, and authentication evidence; (b) confirmation that you have read the privacy notice; and (c) acceptance of these Terms of participation. Each checkbox is unticked by default, and submission is blocked until all three are ticked.

Your signature remains visible until you ask to withdraw it (see §7). The record of which privacy notice and terms version were in force at the time of your signature is preserved even after you withdraw, so that moderators and courts can reconstruct what you agreed to.

3.1 Badges

Three small badges may appear next to your entry on the signatory list:

• ORCID badge — you authenticated with ORCID. The badge links to your ORCID profile.
• Verified email at domain badge — you verified an email at a domain on the academic allowlist. The badge states the domain only. It does not validate whatever you wrote in the free-text affiliation field.
• Identity-verified badge — a moderator manually confirmed your identity. We award this badge only on a clear external signal, drawn from one or more of the following kinds of evidence:
  • A matched ORCID record whose public employments/educations corroborate the signing affiliation.
  • An institutional web page (faculty profile, research-group page) that names the signatory and matches the signing affiliation.
  • An institutional email of a different account belonging to the signatory.
  • Prior personal correspondence with a member of the working group.
  We do not publish the per-case basis on which any individual badge was awarded.

4. Rules for comments

Comments are optional. If you choose to leave one, it must:

• Be in your own voice, relevant to the declaration, and no longer than 2 000 characters. The comment input on the signing form enforces this limit and shows a live character counter.
• Not be unlawful. In particular: no content that is defamatory, harassing, hateful, threatening, inciting violence, infringing intellectual property, sexually exploitative of minors, or prohibited by Swiss or EU law.
• Not impersonate another person or falsely attribute statements to them.
• Not contain spam, paid advertising, or links whose primary purpose is commercial promotion.
• Not attempt to evade moderation (e.g. by embedding content in images or by obfuscating it).

We set the bar deliberately low: most well-meaning comments pass. The bar is there to stop abuse of the comments feature, not to police your opinion about artificial intelligence in mathematics.

5. How moderation works

Every comment is reviewed by a moderator before it is published. Signatures are either auto-approved (for low-risk cases) or queued for moderator review under a documented risk-based rule. Our target turnaround time is 24 hours.

Moderators may, at our discretion:

• Approve, reject, or edit-and-approve comments.
• Pin a comment as a “featured” testimonial or endorsement on the site.
• Reject a signature where we have a reasonable basis to believe it is impersonated, automated, or intended to abuse the platform.
• Enable “moderation of everything” mode, pause signing, or adjust per-IP rate limits in response to abuse.

5.1 Statement of reasons

If your comment or signature is rejected and we have an active contact channel for you, we may send a short notice citing the rule you fell on the wrong side of and inviting you to reply via the Report form. This is our statement of reasons under Digital Services Act Art. 17, where it applies.

5.2 Appeals

Internal appeal is a reply to the rejection notice or a new message via the report form; another moderator (not the one who rejected) reviews. You may also pursue out-of-court dispute settlement under the DSA with a certified body where one exists, and in all cases retain your right to go to a competent court.

6. Reporting content: notice and action

If you see a comment or a signature you believe breaks our rules or the law, use the Report form. Pick the relevant category:

• Report a comment — for comments that breach §4 or applicable law.
• Report an impersonated signature — for signatures that appear to be in someone else’s name without their consent.
• General contact — for everything else.

Please include the comment or signature ID where you can. We accept reports from anyone, not just the affected person. A mailto: fallback is also accepted. We aim to act on well-formed reports within a few days. This is our notice-and-action mechanism under Digital Services Act Art. 16, where it applies.

Submitting a notice does not by itself remove the reported content; it triggers a moderator review. We aim to act on well-formed reports within a few days. We may also accept reports by mailto: to admin@leidendeclaration.ai; the form is preferred because it routes to the moderation queue directly.

Please don’t abuse the reporting channel. Repeated bad-faith reports (obviously-false impersonation claims, mass reporting of legitimate comments) will be treated as abuse of the platform under §10 and may themselves be reported under Article 23 of the Digital Services Act.

7. Withdrawal and impersonation

7.1 Withdrawing your own signature

You may withdraw your signature at any time, without giving a reason, via /withdraw. Withdrawal re-authenticates you with the same method you used to sign (ORCID or a fresh email-verification link) and, on success, marks your row as withdrawn, blanks the publicly-visible fields, and deletes the retained ORCID/email linkage used for future duplicate detection.

7.2 Reporting a signature in your name that you did not make

Use the Report form and choose “Report an impersonated signature.” A magic link would go to the impersonator’s mailbox, so we can’t use the normal withdrawal flow here. Instead, our identity reviewers will try to verify your identity independently (an email from your verified institutional address, your ORCID, prior personal contact) and, for confirmed cases, remove the signature.

For ambiguous cases we use a counter-notice window of 7 days: we contact the apparent signer through the address used to sign, give them 7 days to respond, and on no response or unresolved dispute we remove the signature. The complainant is kept informed throughout.

8. The declaration text is fixed

Once published, we do not silently rewrite the text you signed. If a materially different declaration is ever published, it will be announced clearly and existing signatures will not be moved to it automatically. Whether we invite existing signatories to re-sign against a future text is a decision for the working group, not a default action of the software.

9. Your personal data

Our privacy notice is the authoritative description of what we collect, why, how long we keep it, and your rights. Signing creates a record that includes consent timestamps and the versions of the privacy notice and these Terms in force at that moment.

10. Acceptable use of the site

You agree not to:

• Attempt to scrape, bulk-download, or repurpose the signatory list in a way that treats it as a mailing or recruitment list.
• Use automated tools to submit signatures or comments, or to evade rate limits.
• Probe for or exploit security vulnerabilities without first contacting us via the Report form; coordinated, good-faith security research is welcome.
• Use the site to send unsolicited advertising, to phish, or to distribute malware.
• Circumvent authentication — this includes attempting to sign as another person or reusing somebody else’s ORCID credentials.

Serious or repeated breaches may lead to the removal of your signature and comment and, where appropriate, referral to law-enforcement or legal action.

The signatory list and the declaration text are public; once published, they may be captured and re-hosted by third parties beyond our control, including search engines and the Internet Archive. Withdrawing a signature blanks the official record on this site but cannot remove archived snapshots held by third parties. We will, on request, ask the major archives to remove a specific record where they offer a takedown procedure, but we cannot guarantee removal everywhere.

11. No warranties and our liability

In plain English: we run this site with reasonable care, but we can’t promise it will always be available or entirely bug-free. We’re responsible for what we directly cause you that the law says we have to be responsible for — nothing more, nothing less.

The site is provided as is and as available, without any warranty — express, implied or statutory — to the maximum extent permitted by law. We do not warrant that the site will be uninterrupted, timely, free from errors, or secure against every threat. We do not warrant that any particular statement in a comment is accurate.

To the maximum extent permitted by mandatory law, our liability to you for any claim in contract, tort, or otherwise arising out of or in connection with your use of the site is excluded. Nothing in these Terms limits our liability for personal injury caused by negligence, for fraud or fraudulent misrepresentation, for liability under the EU Product Liability Directive 85/374/EEC, or for any other liability that cannot be excluded under mandatory Swiss or EU consumer law.

12. Changes to these terms

Each signature records the Terms in force at the time it was submitted; that record is not rewritten when these Terms change.

When we make a material change to these Terms, we publish a new version and note the change on the About page. Where we have an active contact channel for you (the email used at signing, or via ORCID), we will notify you. Existing signatures remain valid against the version of the Terms in force at the time they were submitted; you are not retroactively bound by the new version. If you wish to post a new comment or otherwise add new content after a material change, you will be asked to accept the new version first. If you do not wish to be associated with the project under the new version, you may withdraw your signature at any time via /withdraw.

Non-material clarifications and typo fixes may be made without a version bump and are dated on the About page.

13. Contact

For website matters, reach us via the Report form or at admin@leidendeclaration.ai. For Declaration-related inquiries, see the Contact page. Controller details — postal address, EU representative where applicable — are in the privacy notice.

14. Governing law and forum

These Terms, and any non-contractual obligation arising out of or in connection with them, are governed by the substantive law of Switzerland, excluding its conflict-of-laws rules.

If you are an EU consumer (within the meaning of Regulation (EU) No 1215/2012, “Brussels Ia”): the choice of Swiss law above does not deprive you of the protection of mandatory rules of your country of habitual residence. We may bring proceedings against you only in the courts of your country of habitual residence; you may bring claims against us either in those courts or in the ordinary courts at the seat of the controller in Zürich, Switzerland.

If you are not an EU consumer, the ordinary courts at the seat of the controller in Zürich, Switzerland have exclusive jurisdiction.

In plain English: if you are an EU consumer, you keep your home-country protections, you sue us at home or in Zurich, and we sue you at home — never in Zurich. Otherwise, Zurich.