Terms of use
Terms of use
The conditions on which this site is published, and the limits of what we can promise about the material on it.
Last updated: 29 July 2026.
By using www.opensciencemuseum.org you accept these terms. They are written to be read, not to be impressive. If you disagree with them, stop using the site.
1. Using the site
You may read, print, save, quote, link to, and teach from anything here. Sharing a link needs no permission. Quoting a passage with attribution needs no permission. Setting a page as required reading needs no permission.
Please do not: attempt to interfere with the site or the server that hosts it; probe or scan for vulnerabilities; scrape at a rate that degrades service for other readers; misrepresent your work as ours or ours as yours; strip the credit lines that name holding institutions; or present material from this site in a way that implies an endorsement, affiliation, or partnership that does not exist. Automated retrieval is acceptable at a courteous rate; our robots.txt allows crawling.
2. Source material is not ours
This is the most important clause on the page.
Open Science Museum does not own, hold, or control any of the original objects it describes. Every book, plate, drawing, map, and instrument in the collection belongs to and is held by another institution, which digitized it and publishes the scan under its own terms. Our record about an object is our work; the object and its scan are not.
It follows that we cannot grant you rights in source material, and nothing on this site should be read as doing so. Our assessment that an item appears to be in the public domain is our reasoning, published in good faith and explained in our editorial standards — it is not a license, a warranty, a clearance, or legal advice, and copyright analysis varies by jurisdiction, by intended use, and over time.
Verify its rights status yourself for your own jurisdiction and purpose, and check the terms published by the holding institution named on the record — those terms govern, not ours. Where an institution asks for particular credit wording, use theirs. For anything commercial, or any use with real exposure, take your own legal advice. Do not rely on this site as your rights clearance.
3. Our own editorial text
The parts we wrote — collection record descriptions, Journal essays, captions, and the pages in this section — are licensed Creative Commons Attribution 4.0 International (CC BY 4.0). Reuse under that license needs no separate permission from us, provided you follow its terms.
Three things the license does not cover, because they are not ours to license: images of source objects, which are governed by the holding institution's terms; quoted material from third-party works; and the Open Science Museum name and wordmark, which you may use to refer to us but not to brand your own project or imply we are involved. Questions about reuse go to lumingrade@gmail.com with "Rights" in the subject line.
4. No warranty on accuracy
We describe our fact-checking in the editorial standards and we hold ourselves to it. What we cannot do is guarantee the result. History of science is a field of contested dates, disputed attributions, incomplete archives, and superseded scholarship; careful work still contains errors, and some of ours will only be found later.
So the site is provided as is. Beyond the standards we have published, we make no warranty — express or implied — that content here is accurate, complete, current, or fit for any particular purpose, including academic citation, publication, legal argument, valuation, or authentication. Do not treat this site as a primary source. Where a claim matters to your work, follow our citations to the primary material and the holding institution's own catalog, and cite those.
To the fullest extent the law allows, Open Science Museum is not liable for any loss arising from reliance on the site, from an error or omission in it, from its unavailability, or from your reuse of material found through it. Nothing here limits liability that cannot lawfully be limited.
Where a factual error is found, our commitment is not that it never happens but that it is fixed openly: corrections are appended to pages with a date rather than made silently. Report errors to lumingrade@gmail.com.
5. External links
We link out constantly and on purpose, because the institutions that digitized this material deserve the traffic. Those sites are not ours. We do not control their content, availability, accuracy, terms, or privacy practices, and a link is not an endorsement of anything beyond the specific item cited. Once you follow a link you are on their site under their rules. Links rot; when you find a dead one, tell us and we will repoint it.
6. Takedown and copyright complaints
If you believe material on this site infringes your copyright, or that we have misjudged an item's public-domain status, write to lumingrade@gmail.com with "Rights" or "Takedown" in the subject line. Include: the page address; a specific identification of the material; your relationship to the work; your contact details; and, if you can, the basis for the claim. Notices under the US Digital Millennium Copyright Act should be addressed to the same address and should contain the statements that Act requires, including a good-faith statement and a statement made under penalty of perjury that you are authorized to act.
Our practice: complaints from a holding institution about its own material are acted on first and discussed afterward. Other complaints are read promptly and, where the claim is credible, the material comes down while we look into it. We will tell you what we did. If we conclude the material was properly published we will explain why and you are free to disagree.
Send notices to lumingrade@gmail.com with the subject line “Rights”. We have not designated a formal agent for statutory notices, and we are not claiming the protections that come with registering one.
7. Changes
These terms may change. The current version is always the one on this page, with its date at the top. Material changes will be reflected in that date; continuing to use the site after a change means you accept the revised terms. We do not keep a public archive of previous versions.
8. Governing law
We have not designated a governing jurisdiction or an exclusive forum. Stating one honestly requires knowing where the operator is established, and that is not yet settled, so we would rather leave it out than assert it. Applicable law applies as it would by default, and nothing on this page purports to remove a right you hold where you live. If any provision is held unenforceable, the rest stands.
These terms describe our practice and are not legal advice. They have not been reviewed by a lawyer.