Terms for accounts
last changed 2026-10-08
What an account is for
Academic Ancestry offers its questions as tools an assistant can use: a reader's assistant, signed in, asks on the reader's behalf what the pages answer. An account exists for that, and to keep a reader's own settings when they sign in on the site, so that the settings follow them to another browser. Reading needs none: every page, sheet and search is open to anyone.
An account is made by signing in with ORCID, Google or GitHub. ORCID is recommended: it is the identity academics already hold, and it joins the account to the person's own record on the site.
What is kept
An account keeps which provider it was signed in with, the identifier that provider gives, the email address and the name where the provider shares them, when the account was made, its plan, and the settings a reader who signs in on the site keeps there: the theme, a sheet's form and bounds, and the last five people they opened. Each call an assistant makes under it keeps the time, the tool, what was asked and whether the answer came, tied to the account for a year at most, so that its daily allowance can be counted. No password is kept; the provider holds it. The provider learns that you signed in here. The privacy notice says the rest: what the site shows about the people it names, and what it records of its readers.
Allowances
Each account has a daily allowance: so many answers a day, and so many searches of OpenAlex's authors a day. When an allowance is used up, the refusal names the number. An institution that needs more writes to academicancestry@proton.me.
Acceptable use
The record is of named people, and it is used as the privacy notice says. The tools are for asking questions, not for copying the record whole. What they answer is not for resale. One person, one account with each provider.
The service
Academic Ancestry is a personal, non-commercial project. The tools and the accounts may change or stop. They are given as they are, with no promise that the record is complete or correct. The record marks where it stops: a line that ends there ends because the sources end, not because nobody follows.
Deleting an account
To have an account and its calls deleted, write to academicancestry@proton.me and say which provider it was made with. The account and every call made under it are deleted within a month, usually much sooner.