Terms & Conditions

About these Terms

These Terms & Conditions ("Terms") are an agreement between you and Alekhni Technologies Private Limited ("Alekhni", "we", "us", or "our"). They apply whenever you visit alekhni.org, join one of our programs, use our writing and citation tools, submit work to our journal, or contact us.

By using the Services described below, you confirm that you have read and agree to these Terms. If you do not agree, please do not use the Services. If you are using them on behalf of a school, association, or other organisation, you agree on its behalf and confirm that you have the authority to do so.

Our Services

Alekhni is an educational initiative that helps students learn academic reading, writing, and research. In these Terms, "Services" means everything we offer, including:

• our website and its articles, guides, quizzes, and other learning resources;
• Fastrack and any other courses, cohorts, workshops, or training sessions we run;
• Alekhni Writer and Write&Cite, our writing and citation tools;
• the Alekhni Student Journal; and
• any support, communications, or community spaces connected to the above.

We are always improving what we offer. Features may be added, changed, or retired, and some Services may be available only in beta, to certain cohorts, or for a limited time.

Who can use the Services

Our Services are designed for school-age learners as well as their parents, teachers, and institutions.

• Students under 18 may use the Services only with the knowledge and consent of a parent, legal guardian, or their school. By allowing a young person to use the Services, the parent, guardian, or school accepts these Terms on their behalf and takes responsibility for their use.
• Parents and guardians are welcome to contact us at any time about how a young person is using the Services.
• Schools, associations, and other organisations that enrol groups of learners are responsible for making sure those learners and their guardians are informed of these Terms and have given any consents required by law.
• You must not use the Services if you are barred from doing so under applicable law.

Accounts and access

Some Services may require you to create an account or to be given access by us or by your school. When you do, you agree to give accurate information, keep your login details private, and tell us promptly if you think someone else has used your account. You are responsible for activity that takes place under your account, and access may not be shared or transferred unless we have agreed to it in writing.

Acceptable use

We want Alekhni to be a safe, respectful place to learn. When using the Services you agree not to:

• break any law or infringe anyone's rights, including copyright and privacy;
• upload or share content that is unlawful, harassing, hateful, sexually explicit, or otherwise inappropriate for a learning environment for young people;
• impersonate another person or misrepresent your age, identity, or affiliation;
• try to gain unauthorised access to the Services, other users' accounts, or our systems, or interfere with their security or operation;
• use bots, scrapers, or other automated means to copy or collect content or data from the Services, except as permitted by us in writing;
• upload viruses or other harmful code, or place unreasonable load on our infrastructure;
• copy, resell, sublicense, reverse engineer, or create competing products from our tools or curriculum, except as the law allows regardless of this restriction; or
• contact other users, especially minors, for any purpose other than legitimate educational activity through the Services.

Academic integrity and AI tools

Alekhni exists to help students think, read, and write for themselves. You agree to:

• submit only work that is your own, or that properly credits the sources and collaborators it draws on;
• cite sources accurately and never fabricate data, references, or results;
• be transparent about any use of AI or other digital tools in your work, following the rules of your school, your teacher, and the venue you are submitting to; and
• use our tools to support your learning, not to bypass it.

Our tools, including suggested edits, explanations, and citation formatting, are aids. They can be wrong. You remain the author of your work and are responsible for checking it before you rely on it or submit it anywhere. We are not responsible for how a school, journal, or institution treats work that you submit elsewhere.

Your content

"Your content" means the writing, research, comments, images, and other material you submit or create through the Services. You keep ownership of your content. We do not claim it as ours.

To run the Services, you give Alekhni a non-exclusive, worldwide, royalty-free licence to host, store, reproduce, display, and process your content, but only as needed to provide, secure, and support the Services for you (and, where you have chosen to submit it, for your school or cohort). If you choose to publish your content through the Student Journal, the additional terms in the next section apply.

You promise that you have the right to submit your content, and that doing so does not infringe anyone else's rights. We may remove content that breaks these Terms or the law.

The Student Journal

The Alekhni Student Journal publishes selected work by student authors. If you submit to it, the following also applies:

• Selection. Submission does not guarantee publication. Editorial and review decisions are made at our discretion and, unless we say otherwise, are final.
• Originality and ethics. Your submission must be original, properly cited, and honestly reported. If it involves people, such as surveys or interviews, you confirm that participants gave informed consent (with guardian consent where they are minors) and that you have followed any rules that apply to your school or research.
• Consent for minors. Where the author is under 18, a parent or guardian must agree to the publication of their name and work.
• Licence to publish. If your work is accepted, you grant us a non-exclusive, worldwide, royalty-free licence to publish, reproduce, distribute, and archive it in the Journal, in indexes and repositories, and in our promotion of the Journal. You may republish your own work elsewhere with a reference to its first publication in the Journal.
• DOIs and the public record. Published articles may be assigned a Digital Object Identifier (DOI) and registered with third-party services. A DOI and its metadata are designed to be permanent, so a published article is generally part of the scholarly record for good. We can correct errors, add notices, or retract work that breaches these Terms or research ethics, but we may not be able to erase every trace of it once it has been indexed elsewhere.
• Our review process. The Journal follows a review process modelled on scholarly practice to give students a realistic experience. It is an educational exercise and does not represent formal accreditation or the standards of a professional academic publisher.

Our intellectual property

The Services, including our name, logos, curriculum, articles, quizzes, illustrations, software, and design, belong to Alekhni Technologies Private Limited or our licensors and are protected by copyright, trademark, and other laws. Except for your content and where we say otherwise, no rights are granted to you other than those in this section.

You may view and use the Services for your own personal or classroom educational purposes. You may quote our articles with proper credit and a link back to the source. Any other copying, distribution, or commercial use needs our written permission.

If you send us ideas or feedback, we may use them to improve the Services without owing you anything for them.

Third-party services and links

The Services work alongside tools and sites we do not control, for example reference managers such as Zotero, Google Forms for enquiries, Substack for our newsletter, and platforms such as HundrED that feature our work. Your use of those is governed by their own terms and privacy policies, and we are not responsible for their content, availability, or practices. If you connect a third-party account to the Services, you authorise us to access it only as needed to provide the feature you asked for.

Fees, payments, and refunds

Much of our website is free to read. Some Services, such as certain programs, licences, or group packages, may be paid. Where that is the case, the price, billing period, and any specific refund or cancellation terms will be shown to you before you pay or set out in a written agreement with us, and those terms apply in addition to these Terms.

• Prices are stated exclusive of applicable taxes unless we say otherwise, and taxes are payable by you.
• You are responsible for the accuracy of your payment details and for any charges from your bank or payment provider.
• Unless the terms shown at purchase say otherwise, or the law requires it, fees already paid for a program that has begun are not refundable.
• If we cancel a program before it starts, we will refund what you paid for it or offer a place in a later cohort.

Educational content and no guarantees

Everything we provide is for general educational purposes. We aim to be accurate and helpful, but we do not promise particular results. In particular, we do not guarantee any grade, test score, admission or scholarship decision, publication outside the Journal, or any other outcome. Nothing on the Services is professional, legal, or medical advice.

Privacy and personal information

We collect and use personal information, such as names, email addresses, school details, and the work you submit, only to run the Services, communicate with you, keep the Services secure, and meet our legal obligations. We take particular care with information about young people.

You can ask us to access, correct, or delete the personal information we hold about you, or withdraw a consent you have given, by writing to us at the address below. If you are a guardian, you can make these requests for a child in your care. We handle personal information in line with the data protection laws that apply to us.

Disclaimers

To the fullest extent permitted by law, the Services are provided "as is" and "as available". We do not promise that they will be uninterrupted, error-free, or free of harmful components, or that suggestions made by our tools will be accurate or suitable for your purposes. We disclaim all warranties that are not expressly stated in these Terms, including warranties of merchantability, fitness for a particular purpose, and non-infringement.

Limitation of liability

To the fullest extent permitted by law, Alekhni and its directors, employees, and partners will not be liable for any indirect, incidental, special, consequential, or punitive loss, or for loss of data, profits, opportunities, or goodwill, arising from your use of, or inability to use, the Services.

Our total liability to you for any claim relating to the Services will not exceed the amount you paid us for the relevant Service in the twelve months before the event that gave rise to the claim. If the Service was free, our liability is limited to the smallest amount the law allows.

Nothing in these Terms excludes or limits liability that cannot be excluded or limited under applicable law, such as liability for fraud or wilful misconduct.

Indemnity

You agree to compensate us for losses, claims, and reasonable costs that arise from your breach of these Terms or your content infringing someone else's rights, to the extent the law allows. This does not apply to a minor personally; where a minor is involved, it applies to the parent, guardian, or organisation that allowed them to use the Services.

Suspension and termination

You can stop using the Services at any time, and you can ask us to close your account by writing to us. We may suspend or end your access, or remove content, if you breach these Terms, if we reasonably believe that someone's safety or the security of the Services is at risk, if the law requires it, or if we stop providing a Service. Where it is reasonable to do so, we will tell you why and give you a chance to save your content.

Sections that by their nature should continue after these Terms end, including those on your content, our intellectual property, the Journal's public record, disclaimers, liability, and governing law, will continue to apply.

Changes

We may update these Terms from time to time, for example when we add new Services or when the law changes. We will post the new version on this page with a new "last updated" date, and where a change is significant we will make reasonable efforts to tell you directly. If you keep using the Services after a change takes effect, you accept the updated Terms.

Governing law and disputes

These Terms are governed by the laws of India, without regard to conflict-of-law rules. If you have a concern or a dispute, please write to us first at write@alekhni.com so we can try to resolve it in good faith. If we cannot resolve it informally, the courts with jurisdiction over the location of Alekhni Technologies Private Limited's registered office will have exclusive jurisdiction, unless mandatory law gives you the right to bring a claim elsewhere.

General

• Entire agreement. These Terms, together with any written agreement or program terms we give you, are the whole agreement between you and us about the Services.
• If part is unenforceable. If a part of these Terms is found to be invalid, the rest stays in effect.
• No waiver. If we do not enforce a right straight away, we have not given it up.
• Assignment. You may not transfer your rights under these Terms without our consent. We may transfer ours as part of a reorganisation or sale of our business, provided your rights are not reduced.
• Events beyond our control. We are not responsible for delays or failures caused by events outside our reasonable control, such as outages of internet, hosting, or third-party services.
• Electronic communication. You agree that we may contact you by email or through the Services, and that this satisfies any requirement for communications to be in writing.

Contact us

Questions about these Terms, or a request about your information? Write to write@alekhni.com or use our contact page. We typically respond within two to three business days.

Alekhni Technologies Private Limited