Terms and Conditions

1. About these terms

These terms apply to your use of meridianresearches.com, to consultancy services provided by Meridian Research Consultancy ("Meridian", "we", "us"), and to the purchase of our methodology guides. By using the site, commissioning a project or buying a guide, you agree to them. If you do not agree, please do not use the site or our services.

"You" means the person using the site or buying a guide, or, for consultancy, the person or institution that commissions the work (the "client"). If you accept these terms for an institution, you confirm that you are authorised to do so.

Our Privacy Policy and Cookie Policy explain how we handle personal information, and our Ethics page sets out the research-integrity standards we work to.

2. Using the website

You may browse and read the site for your own research and study. You agree not to:

• use the site unlawfully, or to send spam or malicious code;
• attempt to gain unauthorised access to the site, its servers or the administration area;
• scrape or bulk-download content, including guides and Insights, or use it to train or populate an AI system, except as permitted for search engine indexing;
• impersonate Meridian, or misrepresent your relationship with us.

We work to keep the site accurate and available, but we may change, suspend or withdraw any part of it without notice and do not promise it will be free of errors or interruptions.

3. Insights, guides and other content

Our Insights articles, guides and other published material explain research methodology. They are for education and general information. They are not clinical or medical advice, they are not a substitute for statistical or methodological advice on your specific project, and methodological standards change over time. You remain responsible for the methods you choose and how you apply them.

All content on the site, including text, figures, guides, code and design, belongs to Meridian or its licensors and is protected by copyright. You may quote short passages with attribution and a link. Any other reuse needs our written permission.

4. Consultancy services

4.1 Proposals and the agreement

Each project begins with a written proposal, sent by email, setting out the research question, review type, service tier, deliverables, target journals, fee and estimated timeline. A project is agreed when you accept the proposal in writing and pay the commitment deposit. The proposal and these terms together form our agreement; where they differ, the proposal prevails. Unless it says otherwise, a proposal is valid for 30 days.

4.2 Scope

The scope is the agreed research question (including its PICO or equivalent), review type, analyses and target journals. Work outside that scope is not included in the fee. Examples are a new or substantially changed research question, a change of review type (for example, from pairwise to network meta-analysis), adding a new dataset or population after the search is complete, and support beyond the three-journal limit in section 4.5. We will tell you before starting anything out of scope and agree any additional fee with you in writing first.

4.3 Your responsibilities

• Give us accurate information, and the materials and decisions we need, in good time.
• Make sure you are entitled to share any data or documents you give us, and that any necessary ethics approvals and registrations are in place.
• Send only published or de-identified data, unless we have agreed in writing how identifiable data will be handled (see the Privacy Policy).
• Review drafts and respond to our questions within a reasonable time.
• Pay invoices when due.

Delays in your responses extend the timeline. If a project receives no response from you for 90 days, we may treat it as paused and agree a new timetable with you when you return.

4.4 Fees and milestone payments

Unless the proposal says otherwise, fees are payable in three milestones:

• Fees are quoted and invoiced in US dollars and are due within 14 days of the invoice, by the payment method stated on it. You pay any bank, transfer or currency charges on your side.
• Where we propose the research topic, a topic development fee applies. It is stated in the proposal and credited against the project fee if you go on to commission the review.
• If a payment is more than 14 days overdue, we may pause work until it is received.
• The third milestone also becomes due if, after draft delivery, you submit or publish the work, or a substantial part of it, without our continued support, or you end the project for reasons other than our failure to perform.
• Prices include any taxes we are required to charge. You are responsible for any taxes payable in your own country.

4.5 Revisions and journal support

• Before submission, we revise the draft as many times as you reasonably need, within the agreed scope.
• We support submission to up to three journals, in an order agreed with you. A desk rejection counts as one of the three. Support covers reformatting, cover letters, responses to reviewers and the additional analyses reviewers request, until a final decision.
• Support beyond three journals, or for a question or dataset that has changed, is out of scope and quoted separately.

4.6 Timelines

Timelines in proposals and on our website are good-faith estimates. They depend on the volume of evidence, your response times and journal processes, none of which we control. We will tell you promptly if we expect a significant delay.

4.7 No guarantee of publication

Editorial and peer-review decisions are made independently by journals. We do not and cannot guarantee that a manuscript will be accepted by any journal, or within any time. What we commit to is methodological rigour, transparent reporting and the support described in this section.

4.8 Authorship and research integrity

• Authorship is decided by you and your co-authors, who are responsible for the submitted work, its interpretation and its conclusions. Meridian does not seek authorship unless this is agreed in writing and the contributor meets the journal's authorship criteria.
• The ICMJE Recommendations state that contributors who do not meet the criteria for authorship should be acknowledged. You agree to acknowledge Meridian's methodological, statistical and writing support, and how it was funded, as your target journal's policy and the ICMJE Recommendations require. We will provide suitable wording on request.
• We will not fabricate, falsify or selectively report data or results, manipulate analyses to reach a preferred conclusion, suggest fictitious reviewers, or manipulate citations. We may decline or end a project, without liability, if we are asked to do any of these things or if we reasonably believe the work will be used in breach of publication ethics.
• We use AI assistants, including Anthropic's Claude, in our work, as described on our Ethics page and in the Privacy Policy. If your institution, funder or target journal restricts this, tell us before the project starts.

4.9 Confidentiality

Each of us will keep the other's confidential information confidential and use it only for the project. For us, that includes your research question, data, drafts, results and the fact that you are our client. This does not apply to information that is or becomes public other than through a breach of these terms, that the recipient already had or develops independently, or that must be disclosed by law. These obligations continue after the project ends. We are happy to sign a separate confidentiality agreement on request.

4.10 Ownership of the work

• When all fees for the project have been paid, you own the deliverables created for you: the manuscript, the analysis outputs, the extraction forms and the analysis code.
• Until then, Meridian keeps the rights in the deliverables, and you may use them only to review the work with us. Using unpaid work in a submission or publication makes the outstanding fees due at once.
• Meridian keeps its pre-existing materials, templates, methods and general know-how, including generic code not specific to your project, and may continue to use them. Where these are part of a deliverable, you receive a permanent licence to use them as part of that work.

4.11 Cancellation and refunds

• If you cancel before work begins, we refund the deposit in full, less any non-refundable payment processing fees.
• If you cancel after work begins, the deposit is not refunded, as it covers work already done. If you cancel after draft delivery, the second milestone is also due if it has not been paid, and section 4.4 sets out when the third milestone becomes due.
• If we cancel, or fail to deliver what was agreed and do not put it right within a reasonable time after you tell us, we refund the payments for the work not delivered. If that happens before the draft is delivered, we refund the deposit in full.
• A milestone payment is not refundable once the work it pays for has been delivered. Rejection by a journal is not a failure to deliver.

Consumers in the EU and UK. If you commission a project as a consumer, not for your work or institution, you may cancel within 14 days of agreeing it. If you ask us to start work within those 14 days and then cancel, you pay for the work done up to the time you tell us. Nothing in these terms affects your statutory rights as a consumer.

4.12 Ending a project

Either of us may end a project by written notice if the other materially breaches these terms and does not put it right within 14 days of being asked to. We may also end a project immediately in the circumstances in section 4.8, if a payment is more than 30 days overdue, or if our staff are subjected to abusive conduct. Sections 4.9, 4.10, 7, 10 and 11 continue after a project ends.

5. Methodology guides

5.1 What you buy

A guide is a PDF available for download from a permanent access link, which we email to the address you enter at checkout. Your purchase includes every later edition of the same guide, at no extra cost, for as long as we publish it. If we stop publishing a guide, we will tell you by email and keep your link working for at least 90 days so you can download the final edition. You can read a free sample of each guide before buying.

5.2 Price and payment

Prices are in US dollars and are shown before you pay. The price charged is the one shown when you start checkout. Payment is taken by PayPal, by PayPal account or by card, and is subject to PayPal's terms. Please check the email address you enter: the guide is delivered there, and if it is mistyped, contact us and we will help.

5.3 Your licence

We grant you a personal, non-exclusive, non-transferable licence to:

• download, keep and print the guide for your own study, research and teaching preparation;
• quote short passages with attribution.

You may not:

• share the guide or your access link with others, or post either online;
• copy, resell, sublicense or redistribute the guide, in whole or in part;
• use the guide as course material for others, or on an institutional network;
• upload it to file-sharing services or AI systems, or use it to train an AI model.

For teaching or institutional use, contact us about a licence. We may suspend an access link that shows signs of being shared publicly, and will contact you first where we can.

5.4 Cancellation and refunds

A guide is digital content made available straight away. At checkout you ask for immediate access and acknowledge that, once the download is made available, you lose the 14-day right to cancel that consumers have under EU and UK law. We confirm this in the email that delivers your guide.

If a guide is faulty, cannot be downloaded or opened, or is materially different from its description, tell us at contact@meridianresearches.com. We will fix the problem or send a working file, and if we cannot, we will refund you in full. A refund ends access to the guide. Nothing in this section limits your rights under the consumer law of the country you live in.

If a payment is reversed or charged back, access to the guide ends. Please contact us first: most problems can be solved quickly.

6. Third-party services

The site links to, and our services use, services run by others, including PayPal, journal submission systems, trial and protocol registries and Google's translation service. We are not responsible for their content, availability or terms, which apply when you use them.

7. Liability

Nothing in these terms limits or excludes liability for fraud, for death or personal injury caused by negligence, or any other liability that cannot be limited or excluded by law, including your statutory rights as a consumer.

Subject to that:

• We are not liable for decisions made by journals, editors or peer reviewers, or for the consequences of a manuscript being rejected or delayed.
• We are not liable for indirect or consequential loss, or for loss of profit, funding, grants, opportunity, reputation or data that you could have backed up.
• Our total liability arising from a project or a purchase is limited to the amount you paid us for that project or purchase.
• Except as stated in these terms, the site and its free content are provided "as is", without warranties of any kind, to the extent the law allows.

You are responsible for, and will compensate us for reasonable losses arising from, materials you give us that you were not entitled to share, and any misrepresentation of our role in your published work.

8. Events beyond our control

Neither of us is responsible for a delay or failure caused by events outside our reasonable control, such as serious illness, natural disasters, war, internet or power failures, or the failure of a payment or hosting provider. The affected party will tell the other promptly and do what it reasonably can to limit the effect.

9. Changes to these terms

We may update these terms. The version that applies to a project is the one in force when the project was agreed, and the version that applies to a guide purchase is the one in force when you bought it. For later use of the website, the current version applies, and the date at the top shows when it last changed.

10. Governing law and disputes

These terms are governed by the laws of the State of Wyoming and the federal laws of the United States of America, without regard to conflict-of-law rules. The state and federal courts located in Wyoming have jurisdiction over any dispute. If you are a consumer, you also keep the protection of the mandatory laws of the country where you live, and may bring proceedings in its courts.

If a dispute arises, please write to us first at contact@meridianresearches.com. We will both try in good faith to resolve it within 30 days before either of us starts legal proceedings.

11. General

• These terms, with any accepted proposal, are the whole agreement between us about their subject, and replace earlier discussions.
• If any part is found unenforceable, the rest continues to apply.
• A delay in enforcing a right does not waive it.
• You may not transfer your rights under these terms without our consent. We may transfer ours to a successor to the business, provided your rights are not reduced.
• Notices may be given by email to the addresses we normally use with each other.
• These terms are written in English, which is the binding version. A translation produced through the Translate menu is provided for convenience only.

12. Contact

Meridian Research Consultancy
Email: contact@meridianresearches.com
Website: meridianresearches.com