Community Guidelines

01Purpose and research integrity

Iktinah Community helps adults find research collaborators, discuss scoped research work, publish verified participant calls, and share inspectable Agent Skills. Represent your identity, affiliations, qualifications, methods, approvals, capacity, conflicts, and contribution expectations accurately.

Do not fabricate results or credentials, impersonate another person or institution, manipulate engagement, plagiarise, misstate authorship, or use Community to arrange academic misconduct. Explicitly discuss contribution and authorship expectations; the CRediT role labels describe expected work but do not guarantee authorship.

02Collaboration posts and applications

• Define the research question, current stage, role, responsibilities, skills, time commitment, capacity, working language, geography, and closing date.
• Use public links for protocols, repositories, publications, and DOIs. Do not publish confidential datasets, private correspondence, credentials, embargoed manuscripts, or third-party personal data.
• Applications expose a snapshot of the applicant's Community profile to the publisher. Keep applicant information inside the selection process and do not reuse it for marketing or unrelated recruitment.
• Acceptance creates a Community connection; moving into a paid Team research space is a separate, explicit invitation.

03Participant calls

Participant calls are for adults only and must have current approval or formal exemption from an identifiable ethics body. Iktinah privately malware-scans and reviews evidence before listing the call. Clinical studies must include a recognised registry where registration is applicable.

Iktinah is a discovery directory—not a sponsor, ethics committee, consent system, screening service, or health-data processor. Eligibility, consent, screening, study data, and compensation administration must remain on the approved institutional destination. Never ask people to post health, genetic, biometric, consent, or screening information in Community, profiles, comments, or messages.

Do not recruit for unapproved studies, deceptive or coercive studies, studies targeting children, illegal research, discriminatory exclusions without scientific justification, or calls whose external destination differs materially from the reviewed record.

04Agent Skills and package safety

An Agent Skill release must be a ZIP containing exactly one SKILL.md with only name and description frontmatter, plus supported references, assets, scripts, and optional agent metadata. Releases are immutable and carry file hashes, an archive digest, risk findings, and a registry signature.

Instruction-only packages may publish after automated checks. Packages with scripts or active content require human review. Scanning and review reduce risk but cannot guarantee safety. Website installation targets one connected Zotero device; the plugin verifies the registry key, signature, archive, paths, limits, and every file, then installs disabled and untrusted until local review.

Do not include malware, exploit code, credential theft, destructive commands, undisclosed telemetry, private keys, secrets, obfuscated payloads, or instructions intended to bypass user consent or platform safeguards.

05Conduct, privacy, and safety

• Be specific, constructive, and relevant. Critique ideas and methods without attacking people.
• No harassment, hate, threats, sexual exploitation, stalking, doxxing, spam, scams, or discriminatory targeting.
• Do not expose personal contact details without consent. Use Iktinah's profile visibility controls, applications, and encrypted messages.
• Report suspected unsafe research, privacy violations, impersonation, misinformation, malware, or copyright abuse. Block a member when direct interaction should stop.

06Moderation, enforcement, and appeals

Iktinah may limit reach, pause review, remove content from discovery, reject or delist a release, restrict interaction, suspend an account, preserve relevant audit evidence, or contact an institution or authority where law or imminent safety requires it. Decisions consider severity, context, repetition, credible evidence, and risk to researchers or participants.

Automated checks do not make final safety claims. Participant evidence and active skill packages receive human review. Members may request reconsideration through support, identifying the affected item and explaining the factual or policy error. Retaliation against reporters or applicants is prohibited.