Content Rules

Each participant in our community is responsible for maintaining these standards and complying with these rules. Your use of this website means that you accept and agree to abide by these rules, which supplement and form part of the website’s Terms of Service. 

Content Standards:

• Inclusivity and Respect: Our platform promotes diverse viewpoints while prohibiting harassment, bullying, and discrimination.
• Integrity and Trust: We expect all content to reflect honesty and transparency, adhering to our values and ethical standards.
• Lawful and Ethical Behaviour: Community members must respect intellectual property rights and privacy, ensuring all content is legal and ethical.
• Research Integrity: Shared research should be the result of ethical work, free from misleading or harmful content.

Prohibited Content

Threats of violence and incitement

We do not allow content or actions that threaten, encourage, or incite violence against anyone or any community, either directly or indirectly.

Hate speech

We do not allow content that promotes violence or hatred against any individuals or groups based on characteristics like race, ethnicity, national origin, religion, disability, disease, age, sexual orientation, gender, or gender identity.

We do not allow content that glorifies, celebrates, downplays, or trivialises violence, suffering, abuse, or deaths of individuals or groups. This includes the use of scientific or pseudoscientific claims to pathologise, dehumanise, or disempower others. 

We do not allow calls for intolerance, exclusion, or segregation based on protected characteristics, nor do we allow the glorification of groups which do any of the above.

Harassment

Acume exists to share and discuss ideas. We do not tolerate harassment, which includes:

• Bullying, whether direct or indirect, and harassment in any form, are strictly prohibited. Examples include shaming, abusive language, unwarranted criticism, or spreading rumours.
• Using Acume’s comment features in a way intended to annoy, harass or hurt someone.

Restricted categories

We do not allow content that engages in the following restricted categories of activity:

• Sharing of personal information without consent.
• Promotion of suspect, harmful or extremist content.
• Content that might be interpreted as promoting sexual or violent exploitation.
• Content that might be interpreted as promoting the exploitation of minors.
• Content that only serves a political agenda.
• Intentional distortions and especially systematic false claims about historic events and facts.
• Pseudo-scientific claims related to asserting the superiority or inferiority of a particular group (on bases including race, ethnicity or gender).
• Unqualified health claims or advice which, if acted on, are likely to have detrimental health effects on persons or public safety.
• Facilitation of illegal services.
• Facilitation of copyright violation.

Related conduct

We do not allow content that engages in on-platform, off-platform, or cross-platform campaigns of targeting, harassment, hate speech, violence, or disinformation. We may consider off-platform actions in assessing an Acume account and restrict access or availability to that account.

Spam

We do not allow spam on Acume. Spam will not be shared, without explanation as to why. While it is hard to define this content with precision or completeness, here are some representative behaviours we look for that are characteristic of spam:

• Content primarily to drive traffic to, or increase the search rankings of, an external site, product, or service.
• Posting duplicate content from a single contributor.
• Performing a disproportionately large number of interactions, particularly by automated means. This includes bulk, indiscriminate interactions, such as automated liking or leaving comments on bulk content without well-intended purpose. Acume depends on various user behaviours — such as “likes” and comments — to determine what content to feature and make the site work well for everyone. So, we don’t allow artificial behaviours that skew this system and as a result degrade or distort other users’ experiences. 
• Repeatedly using comments or other interactions as a method of promotion.

Copyright and trademark infringement

Respect the copyright and trademarks of publishers and others. Please only include sharable versions of research papers, that are not embargoed by publishers. You may update the associated research paper following the end of an embargo by sending us an email to [email protected].  

Deceptive conduct

We do not allow deceptive conduct on Acume. This includes:

• Posting content or impersonating a person, university or organisation in a way likely to deceive people.
• Using deception to promote a political agenda.
• Presenting research as fact if results are unfounded. Being clear about a research’s limitations is perceived as excellent scholarship.

Ads, Promotions, and Marketing

Third-party advertising and sponsorships are not allowed. You may not advertise or promote third-party products, services, or brands through Acume’s posts, publications, or content. 

Multi-level marketing content is not allowed.

How to Report a Violation

If you believe any form of content on Acume violates these rules, then please contact us immediately at [email protected] and provide the content link and detail of the misconduct. 

In deciding whether someone has violated the rules, we will consider the context, nature and soundness of the research. We look at whether the research was ethically conducted, may cause potential harm and whether it contains extreme content or is misleading.

Violations of our rules may result in consequences such as the removal of problematic research or limiting the contributor’s future use of our website. In extreme cases, the contributor may be banned from using our services.

We may need to revise these rules from time to time by amending this page. Please review this page regularly to ensure you are aware of any changes we make.

If you break the rules

We reserve the right to suspend accounts or remove content, without notice, for any reason, particularly to protect our services, infrastructure, users, reputation or communities. 

Upon investigating or disabling content associated with a content contributor, we will notify you. However, we will not notify you if we believe the content contributor is operating in bad faith, or that notifying you is likely to cause, maintain or exacerbate harm to someone.

Appeals

If you believe your content or account has been restricted or disabled in error or believe there is relevant context we were not aware of in reaching our determination, you can write to us at [email protected]. We will consider all good faith efforts to appeal.

Contact Us

If you have questions or feedback about these rules, let us know. You can contact us at [email protected].