Papers and copyright

naulon holds records for about two million papers. For each one we decide, from the licence that covers it, which of three things we may do with its words. This page says how we decide, what the law lets us do, and how to ask us to change what we do with your work.

Three uses

Use	What it means	When
Index	We read the text to search it, match it and find related papers. We never print it.	Every paper we hold lawfully
Show	A free page on naulon displays it unchanged, with its authors and its licence.	A Creative Commons licence of any kind, or public domain
Quote	A paid answer may carry its words.	CC0, CC BY, CC BY-SA or public domain

A retracted or withdrawn paper is still shown, under its notice. It is never quoted in a paid answer.

When we may only index a paper, its page shows the facts about it (title, authors, journal, year, its notices, who cites it) and links to the copy its publisher serves. Facts and ideas are not protected by copyright; the words that express them are.

Where a licence comes from

The licence must come from someone with the right to grant it. A search index that reports a licence can narrow what we do, but it cannot grant it. When two statements disagree, the stricter one wins.

Source	What we read
PubMed Central	The licence PMC states for the version it serves
The publisher, through Crossref	The licence it deposits for the version of record
DOAJ	The licence the journal declares to DOAJ. A journal that lists several cannot say which one an article carries, so the strictest applies
arXiv	arXiv's metadata, abstracts included, is CC0. The paper itself keeps the licence its author chose
A repository	The licence in its own record

The law we rely on

naulon is operated from Japan, and its users are everywhere, so we hold ourselves to the narrower of the rules that apply.

• Searching and matching. Japan's Copyright Act, Article 30-4, permits using a work for data analysis and computer processing that does not present its expression to anyone. The EU's Directive 2019/790, Article 4, permits text and data mining of lawfully accessible works unless the rights holder has opted out in a machine-readable way.
• Showing a short passage in a result. Article 47-5 permits minor use of a work incidental to a search or an analysis and its result, such as the sentence a citation check found. We keep such passages short.
• Showing and quoting under a licence. Creative Commons licences grant more than the law does. Every time we show or quote such text we name its authors, its licence and a link to it, as the licence asks. A ShareAlike licence binds only material someone adapts, so a verbatim quote carries the licence's notice and nothing more. Non-commercial and no-derivatives licences are never quoted in a paid answer.

Article 47-5 asks a service that relies on it to publish how it reads the law and how to reach it. This page is that statement.

Asking us to change something

If you hold the rights to a paper and want us to stop showing, quoting or indexing it, write to help@naulon.app with the paper's DOI or link and what you would like. A takedown removes the paper's page, its text from every answer and search, and the records we archived for it, and keeps it from coming back.

If you wrote the paper and want to add a note for readers rather than remove anything, see For researchers.