This guide is for informational purposes only and does not constitute legal advice. Please consult your own legal counsel for guidance specific to your situation.

Using Elicit to research and write follows the same process researchers have always used:

1. Find relevant sources

2. Read and analyze them

3. Synthesize ideas

4. Write something new

5. Cite appropriately

Elicit accelerates steps 1-3. Steps 4-5 are unchanged, and that's where copyright compliance lives. Elicit changes how fast you find and analyze research. It doesn't change how you're allowed to use it from a copyright perspective.

Elicit searches a database of over 138 million papers, including 100% of PubMed. We estimate approximately 80% overlap with Embase journals. The search uses metadata (titles, abstracts, authors) from both open-access and paywalled papers. Search does not bias toward open-access content. Further information can be found at Elicit's Help Center.

No. Elicit searches across publicly available metadata (titles, abstracts, bibliographic information). This is the same metadata available in any academic database search.

• Titles and abstracts

• Full text (when available as open-access papers, papers you upload with appropriate access, or papers Elicit has access to through its own publisher agreements)

The same things you could always do with research articles:

• Read and analyze them

• Quote short passages with attribution

• Paraphrase and synthesize ideas in your own words

• Cite them in your work

No. The source content has the same copyright status regardless of how you discover it. Finding a paper through Elicit is no different than finding it through PubMed or Google Scholar. The underlying copyright protections and license of that content remain unchanged.

Whether you can upload subscription articles depends on the terms in your organization's agreement with the article's publisher. You will need to check this with your legal or library services team.

Publishers have different restrictions on the use of AI with their content. For example:

• Some require an AI or data mining license to upload content into an AI platform

• Others distinguish between retrieval use versus model training

• Publishers have different rules for the use of the open access CC-BY-NC content license by commercial organizations

If in doubt, check the terms of your publisher agreements with your legal or library services team.

Elicit recommends checking with your legal or library services team to see if your existing agreements with publishers already allow this. If they do not, most major academic publishers now offer specific licenses that cover the use of subscription content with AI tools like Elicit. Ask your legal or library services team about AI-specific licensing options from your publishers. and for more information reference our Acquiring AI Rights from Your Publisher page.

• Does your license include TDM (text and data mining) rights?

• Are there AI-specific clauses or restrictions in your publisher license agreement?

• Does your license permit sharing with third-party tools?

• The document is stored privately in your account

• It is used solely for your analysis

• For Enterprise customers: uploaded papers, prompts, and outputs are never used to train models

• Documents remain encrypted at rest and in transit

The Elicit browser extension allows you to view full-text papers from your institutional subscriptions. The extension navigates to publisher websites, locates the PDF, and downloads it using your existing institutional access. The PDF content passes through the extension but is not stored locally. 

Elicit's Terms require users to confirm that they will only upload content they have the right to use within Elicit. If you are uncertain about a source, do not upload it, and instead stick to Open Access content or articles you know are properly licensed.

Open Access articles with CC-BY licenses do not require separate AI-processing licenses because CC-BY licenses already permit reproduction and processing by definition. The key requirement under CC-BY is attribution, not obtaining additional permissions for AI processing.

Open Access content is generally more permissive, but the specific license matters:

Important note regarding commercial use of content by enterprise users: CC-BY-NC and CC-BY-NC-ND Open Access content may not be permitted for follow on commercial use. Publishers have different rules on how NC-licensed Open Access articles can be used by commercial organizations. 

The copyright framing for Elicit’s automated features applies equally to Elicit's agentic features.

When Elicit autonomously discovers, retrieves, or synthesizes research on your behalf, the same rules govern the resulting content: Elicit is responsible for licensing the content it provides through the platform, and you remain responsible for how you use that content in your own work, including proper attribution and citation. Automation changes the speed and scale of research; it does not change the underlying copyright obligations.

Elicit does not claim copyright ownership in any outputs generated through customer queries. To the extent intellectual property rights exist in your outputs, you will retain ownership over such intellectual property rights to that content.

Elicit's summaries are a tool to help you understand the research faster. Your own writing should reflect your own original synthesis of research conducted and should cite original sources, not Elicit.

Yes, with judgment:

• Summaries and analysis: fine to use as input to your work

• Metadata and citations: unrestricted

• Short quotes from source articles: attribute them as you normally would

• Long verbatim excerpts: require express permission to use or must be subject to the Fair Use copyright exception