Operating rules for fair, safe, and sustainable use of the public ATGC platform.
Shared platform, shared responsibility

These terms are written for a shared public analysis service. They are meant to stay easy to update as quotas, workflows, or operating practices evolve.

1. Scope

These terms govern access to the public ATGC platform, including its submission forms, result pages, notification flows, and related APIs.

By using the service, you agree to comply with these rules and with any additional project-specific instructions shown on individual tools or submission forms.

2. Intended use

The platform is intended for research, education, evaluation, and technical analysis workflows related to bioinformatics and phylogenetics.

Unless explicitly agreed otherwise in writing, the service must not be treated as a regulated medical device, an emergency service, or a guaranteed production environment for safety-critical decisions.

3. Acceptable use

Users may submit only data and workloads they are authorized to process on the platform.

Users must not upload unlawful, malicious, deceptive, or rights-infringing content, including payloads intended to probe, overload, or compromise the service.

Users must not attempt to bypass quotas, automate abusive retries, scrape protected endpoints, or interfere with other users’ jobs or results.

4. Fair use and rate limits

The public submission flow is rate-limited by default to 5 job submissions per hour per email address.

Related protection controls may also apply to verification and anti-abuse endpoints, including 10 verification requests per minute on verification requests and up to 5 verification emails per 1 day.

If you need higher throughput, sustained automated usage, classroom-scale batches, or an institutional integration, contact atgc-contact@lirmm.fr before sending larger volumes.

The ATGC team may adapt limits, queue policies, or access conditions whenever needed to preserve service availability and fairness.

5. User responsibilities

Users remain responsible for the legality, integrity, and scientific appropriateness of the data they submit.

Users should avoid submitting personal data, confidential material, or regulated datasets unless they have a clear legal basis and explicit authorization to process that data through this service.

Users are also responsible for reviewing outputs before publication, downstream reuse, or decision-making.

6. Availability and support

The platform is operated on a best-effort basis. Jobs may be queued, delayed, rejected, or interrupted because of maintenance, security controls, infrastructure limits, or tool-specific constraints.

The ATGC team may temporarily suspend access, specific tools, or particular users when necessary to protect the platform or investigate incidents.

7. Liability

The ATGC team does not guarantee uninterrupted availability, permanent retention of results, or fitness for a particular purpose beyond the stated service scope.

To the extent permitted by law, users bear responsibility for backups, validation of scientific interpretations, and any downstream use of generated outputs.

8. Acknowledgement request

If you use the ATGC platform or results obtained through it in the context of research work, you are kindly asked to acknowledge the ATGC platform in the acknowledgements section of related outputs.

This includes, when relevant, journal articles, preprints, posters, conference presentations, theses, dissertations, technical reports, and similar academic or scientific deliverables.

A more formal citation format, persistent identifier, or HAL record may be published later by the ATGC team. Until then, please use a clear acknowledgement that explicitly names the ATGC platform.

9. Changes to these terms

These terms may be updated from time to time to reflect operational, legal, or technical changes.

Continued use of the platform after an update means the revised version applies to subsequent access and submissions.