Please read these Terms of Use carefully before using ResearchVault. By using this software, you agree to these terms.
Application: ResearchVault (Windows desktop) ·
Publisher: VMH Digital ·
Contact: [email protected]
Effective / Last Updated: July 31, 2026
These Terms of Use ("Terms") form an agreement between you and VMH Digital ("we", "us", "our"), the developer and publisher of the ResearchVault Windows desktop application (the "Application"). By downloading, installing, or using the Application, you agree to comply with and be bound by these Terms and by our Privacy Policy, which is incorporated into these Terms by reference. If you do not agree, you must uninstall and discontinue using the Application immediately.
These Terms apply to all users, including students, academic researchers, laboratory staff, universities, research institutes, and independent researchers.
You must be at least 18 years old, or the age of majority in your jurisdiction, to accept these Terms. If you are installing or using the Application on behalf of a university, research institute, employer or other organisation, you confirm that you have authority to bind that organisation to these Terms, and "you" includes that organisation.
VMH Digital grants you a non-exclusive, non-transferable, limited licence to install and use ResearchVault on your Windows device for personal, academic, or professional research purposes, subject to these Terms.
This licence does not include the right to:
ResearchVault operates entirely on your own Windows device. We do not host or back up your data remotely, and we hold no copy of it. As a result:
We specifically recommend against placing your vault inside a continuously synced cloud folder, because such services can copy a live database and its journal file at different moments and leave it corrupt. Back up to a ZIP archive instead — that is what the feature exists for.
All content you create in the Application — projects, notes, highlights, comments, tasks, imported files and everything else ("Your Content") — remains your property. We claim no ownership of it and no licence over it, and because it is stored only on your machine we have no access to it and no ability to moderate, recover or inspect it.
You are responsible for ensuring you have the right to store and use everything you put into the Application. In particular:
You agree not to use the Application to store or produce material that is unlawful in your jurisdiction, to infringe anyone's intellectual property or privacy rights, or to circumvent the Application's licensing or update mechanisms. You must not distribute modified builds of the Application or present it, or output generated by it, as the product of anyone other than VMH Digital.
ResearchVault is an organisational tool. It formats citations from the bibliographic fields you supply, and generates exports from the content you have written. It does not verify that a citation is correct, that a reference exists, or that metadata fetched from a DOI lookup is accurate — third-party metadata is sometimes wrong, and you should check anything you intend to publish.
Responsibility for the accuracy and integrity of your academic work is entirely yours. Nothing produced with the Application constitutes professional, scientific, medical, legal or academic advice from us, and we make no representation that any output will satisfy the requirements of a particular journal, institution or examining body.
The ad-free upgrade is a one-time in-app purchase made through the Microsoft Store. The applicable price and licence scope are those presented to you at the point of purchase, and they form part of these Terms. Microsoft handles the transaction, and Microsoft's payment, cancellation and refund policies apply — we never receive or store your card details. Any statutory right of withdrawal or cancellation available to you as a consumer is unaffected.
The upgrade removes the sponsored banner. It does not unlock research functionality: every research feature is available in the free edition, and we do not intend to move existing free features behind payment. We may change pricing or introduce additional paid features prospectively; changes will not affect a licence you have already purchased.
The Application, its source code, user interface design, assets, graphical elements, documentation, and the "ResearchVault" name and logo are the exclusive property of VMH Digital and are protected by copyright and other intellectual property laws. All rights not expressly granted in section 3 are reserved. Third-party components included in the Application remain the property of their respective owners and are used under their own licences.
You may not copy, reproduce, or redistribute any part of the Application, its design, or its branding without explicit written permission from VMH Digital.
If you send us suggestions or feature ideas, you grant us a free, worldwide, perpetual right to use them to improve the Application without obligation or compensation to you. You are not required to send us feedback, and we will not treat it as confidential unless we agree otherwise in writing.
ResearchVault is provided "AS IS" and "AS AVAILABLE" without warranty of any kind, either express, implied or statutory, including but not limited to merchantability, fitness for a particular purpose, accuracy, or non-infringement. While we strive to provide a reliable and high-quality application, we do not guarantee that it will be error-free or uninterrupted, that PDF text extraction will succeed on every document, that a DOI lookup will return complete or correct metadata, that reminders will always trigger as expected, or that exported files will be accepted by any third-party system.
Some jurisdictions do not allow the exclusion of certain warranties, so parts of this section may not apply to you. Nothing in these Terms limits any non-excludable statutory consumer rights you may have.
To the maximum extent permitted by law, VMH Digital and its developers shall not be liable for any indirect, incidental, special, consequential, exemplary or punitive damages, nor for any loss of data, loss of research, loss of profits, loss of goodwill, missed deadline or business interruption, resulting from the use or inability to use the Application — including damages arising from data loss, corrupted files, failed backups or restores, incorrect citations, or device failure.
Where liability cannot lawfully be excluded, our total aggregate liability to you for all claims relating to the Application shall not exceed the greater of (a) the total amount you paid us for the Application in the twelve months preceding the claim, or (b) USD 50. Nothing in these Terms excludes liability for death or personal injury caused by negligence, for fraud, or for anything else that cannot lawfully be excluded.
The Application runs on Microsoft Windows and relies on operating-system components and runtimes supplied by Microsoft. The DOI lookup feature queries the public CrossRef metadata service; we do not control that service, its availability, or the accuracy of what it returns. If you choose to keep your vault in a synced cloud folder, that provider's terms apply to those files. We are not responsible for the availability, performance, terms or privacy practices of any third-party platform or service.
VMH Digital reserves the right to release updates, patches, and new versions of ResearchVault, and to discontinue the Application or any feature. Where an update changes the database structure, it migrates your existing vault forward automatically; we do not support downgrading a vault to an earlier version. We may also modify these Terms; the "Last Updated" date above indicates the current version, and material changes will be posted on this page and referenced in the application's release notes. Continued use of the Application after such changes constitutes acceptance of the new Terms.
You may terminate this agreement at any time by uninstalling ResearchVault. VMH Digital may terminate this licence or restrict your access to future updates if you materially violate these Terms. On termination, sections 4, 5, 9, 11, 12 and 16 survive.
Uninstalling the Application does not delete Your Content: your vault lives outside the application folder precisely so that it survives an uninstall. Removing your research is something you do deliberately, by deleting the vault folder yourself.
These Terms are governed by the laws applicable at VMH Digital's place of business, without regard to conflict-of-law rules, and the competent courts of that jurisdiction shall have jurisdiction over any dispute — except where mandatory local consumer protection law entitles you to bring proceedings in, or rely on the law of, your country of residence. If any provision of these Terms is held unenforceable, the remaining provisions continue in full force and the unenforceable provision will be applied to the maximum extent permitted. Our failure to enforce a provision is not a waiver of it. You may not assign these Terms without our consent. These Terms, together with the Privacy Policy and any purchase terms presented to you, constitute the entire agreement between us regarding the Application.
For questions or notices about these Terms:
Research