Terms of service

“Open Research Fund”, “we” and “us” mean Open Research Fund Ltd., a company limited by guarantee incorporated in Singapore. These terms are a contract between you and that company.

We build a profile of your research, identify grants, research awards, prizes, and compute or API credit programmes you may qualify for, and prepare the applications on your behalf. Where a funder allows it, we can also receive and hold awarded funds for you.

We do not charge researchers to use Open Research Fund. We do not take a percentage of anything you win, and we do not charge for preparing, submitting, or managing an application. We are funded by philanthropic grants and donations.

We prepare applications, but you decide what goes out. Every application is shown to you in full and requires your explicit approval before submission. You are responsible for the accuracy of the scientific and factual claims in anything you approve.

You keep ownership of your research, your publications, and everything you give us. You grant us permission to use that material for the sole purpose of finding and preparing funding applications for you. You are responsible for making sure the information you provide is accurate and that you are permitted to share it.

Many major awards are legally made to a university or research institution rather than to an individual. Where that is the case, we prepare the application to the point of submission and route it to whoever at your institution has to authorise it. We cannot bypass an institutional approval that a funder requires.

Where a funder permits us to receive an award on your behalf, the cash sits in a digital wallet provided by our payments partner, Stripe, and is held at their FDIC-insured partner banks. Open Research Fund is not a bank, and deposit insurance is passed through by the institution actually holding the funds. It remains earmarked for you and your research, and you can ask us to transfer it to your institution at any time, subject to the award terms and any checks we are required to run.

Many awards are administered by your university instead. In that case the money goes directly to their bank account, indirect costs are handled by their sponsored research office as usual, and we simply track the award for you.

Awards almost always carry restrictions on how the money may be spent and what must be reported. Those restrictions come from the funder and we cannot waive them.

We can improve your odds and remove the administrative burden. We cannot promise that any application will succeed, that a funder will respond, or that any particular amount will be awarded. Funding decisions belong entirely to funders.

Do not use Open Research Fund to submit applications containing fabricated results, plagiarised work, or misrepresentations of your credentials or affiliation. Do not use it to apply for funding you know you are ineligible for. We will close accounts that do.

You can close your account at any time and ask us to delete your data. We may suspend an account that breaches these terms. If we hold funds for you when an account closes, we will return them to you or to your institution as the award terms require.

You must be at least 18 and using the service for a research lab, group, or institution. The service is not directed at children and we do not knowingly collect information from anyone under 18.

The list is compiled automatically from funders' own pages and public databases and is refreshed daily. We work hard to keep it accurate, but funders change deadlines, amounts and eligibility without notice, and figures marked as estimates are our reading, not the funder's statement. Always confirm the details on the funder's page before you rely on them. Links take you to third-party sites we do not control and are not responsible for.

The site, its design, text, code and the compiled list are ours or licensed to us. You may use the list for your own research and non-commercial purposes, and the public API under the acceptable use policy. Everything you give us remains yours, as set out in section 4.

The service is provided “as is” and “as available”. To the fullest extent permitted by law we make no warranties, express or implied, including as to merchantability, fitness for a particular purpose, accuracy, or that the service will be uninterrupted or error-free. Nothing we provide is legal, tax, or financial advice.

To the fullest extent permitted by law, we are not liable for any indirect, incidental, special, consequential or punitive damages, or for lost funding, lost data, or lost opportunity, arising from your use of the service, even if we have been told they are possible. Because the service is free, our total liability to you for all claims is limited to SGD 100 or the minimum permitted by applicable law, whichever is greater. Some jurisdictions do not allow these limitations, in which case they apply to the extent permitted. Nothing here limits liability for fraud, or for death or personal injury caused by negligence.

You agree to compensate us for losses, costs and reasonable legal fees that arise from information you provided being false, from an application you approved, or from your breach of these terms or the acceptable use policy.

By joining the waitlist or opening an account you agree that we may email you about your applications, awards, and the service. Every non-essential email includes an unsubscribe link, and we honour opt-outs within 10 business days.

We build the site to WCAG 2.1 AA and test it against those criteria. If any part of it is hard for you to use, contact us and we will provide the information or service another way and fix the underlying issue.

Under California Civil Code section 1789.3, California users are entitled to the following: the service is provided by Open Research Fund Ltd. at no charge. Complaints may be directed to us through the contact details on this site, or to the Complaint Assistance Unit of the Division of Consumer Services of the California Department of Consumer Affairs at 1625 North Market Blvd., Suite N 112, Sacramento, CA 95834, or by telephone at (800) 952-5210.

If we change these terms in a way that materially affects you, we will tell you before the change takes effect. Continuing to use the service after that means you accept the revised terms.

These terms are governed by the laws of Singapore. Any dispute that we cannot resolve with you directly is subject to the exclusive jurisdiction of the courts of Singapore. Nothing in these terms gives any person other than you and us a right to enforce them under the Contracts (Rights of Third Parties) Act 2001. Where you use the service from another country, any consumer protections that apply to you there and cannot be excluded still apply.