Terms of use
The terms that apply to the TOSIC website, the members’ area and the AI assistant.
Last updated 29 October 2026
These terms apply to everyone who uses the TOSIC website, the members’ area and the AI assistant. By using the site you accept them. If you do not accept them, please do not use the site.
1. Not medical advice
The information on this site, including the Patient Corner, the guidelines, the education library, the symptom self-check, the clinical tools and the AI assistant, is provided for education and to support professional judgement. It is not a diagnosis, and it does not replace an examination by a qualified clinician who knows your history. Do not delay seeking care, or stop a treatment, because of something you read here.
If you have sudden swelling or discoloration of an arm, a cold, pale or painful hand, chest pain or difficulty breathing, seek emergency care at once.
2. The AI assistant
Ask TOSIC answers from the collaborative’s published material, but answers are produced automatically and can be incomplete or wrong. Check anything that matters against the source documents or with a clinician. Do not enter names or other details that identify you or a patient.
3. Membership and accounts
- Membership is open to the professionals described on the Membership page and is granted at the collaborative’s discretion. The information in your application must be accurate and your own.
- Your account is personal. Keep your password secret and tell us at once if you think someone else has used your account.
- Members-only material — documents, cases, draft guidelines, Delphi statements, registry figures and the directory — is confidential to members. Do not copy, forward or publish it, or use the directory to send unsolicited messages, without the permission of the collaborative.
- We may suspend or end an account that breaks these terms, the collaborative’s code of conduct or the law. You can end your membership at any time by writing to membership@tosicollaborative.org.
4. What you submit
When you submit a story, a case, a proposal, center data or any other content, you confirm that you are entitled to share it and that it does not break anyone’s confidentiality, privacy or intellectual property. You keep ownership of your content, and you give TOSIC a non-exclusive, royalty-free licence to store, review, edit for length and clarity, and publish it for the purposes for which you submitted it.
Clinical cases and center data must be de-identified before submission. Never enter a patient’s name, national identity number, date of birth, contact details or photographs that show their face. Centers are responsible for obtaining the ethics approval and patient consent their institution requires before they submit registry data.
5. Acceptable use
Do not use the site to break the law, to send spam, to impersonate anyone, to probe or interfere with its security, to collect other users’ information, or to submit material that is false, defamatory, abusive or that promotes a commercial product without disclosure.
6. Intellectual property
The TOSIC name, logo and the content of this site belong to the collaborative or to the authors who have licensed it to us. You may read, download and print pages for personal, clinical or educational use, and share patient information with patients, as long as you keep the source and do not change the meaning. Any other reuse, including republishing guidelines or using the TOSIC name or logo to suggest endorsement, needs our written permission. Published articles remain subject to the journal’s own licence.
7. Links and other services
Links to other websites are provided for convenience. We do not control those sites and are not responsible for their content or their privacy practices.
8. Availability and liability
We work to keep the site accurate and available, but we provide it as it is, without guarantees that it will be uninterrupted, error-free or up to date at every moment. To the extent the law allows, TOSIC, its committees and its members are not liable for any loss arising from the use of the site or reliance on its content. Nothing in these terms limits liability that cannot be limited by law.
9. Privacy
How we handle personal information is described in the Privacy notice. How collaborative work is published is described in the Publication policy.
10. Changes and contact
We may update these terms; the date at the top of the page shows when they last changed, and continuing to use the site after a change means you accept it. Questions about these terms go to info@tosicollaborative.org.