CAIT Terms and Conditions
Effective date: 8 August 2026
1. Introduction and Definitions
The Community Archive for Integrated Teaching, hereinafter referred to as "CAIT", "the Platform", or "the Service", is an academic web service through which educators may share, browse, adapt, and collaborate on teaching materials, including lecture notes, slides, assignments, exam questions, and related open educational resources. The Platform is operated by Technische Universiteit Delft (Delft University of Technology, TU Delft), acting through the CAIT team, a working group hosted within that institution and supported by partner institutions, the whole being hereinafter referred to as "the Provider", "we", "us", or "our". For the purposes of the present document, "User", "you", or "your" denotes any natural person who accesses, registers with, or otherwise makes use of the Platform; "Content" denotes any file, text, metadata, comment, rating, or other material uploaded, published, or transmitted through the Service; and "Account" denotes the personal access credentials established by a User through the federated authentication procedure described below. Defined terms carry the meaning ascribed to them throughout, unless the context plainly requires otherwise.
Pursuant to Article 3:15d of the Dutch Civil Code (Burgerlijk Wetboek), which requires a provider of an information society service to render its identification details readily, directly, and permanently accessible, the following particulars are stated. The contracting party is Technische Universiteit Delft, a legal person governed by public law (publiekrechtelijke rechtspersoon), established at Stevinweg 1, 2628 CN Delft, the Netherlands, entered in the Commercial Register of the Netherlands Chamber of Commerce under KVK number 27364265, reachable by telephone at +31 15 278 9111 and by electronic mail at info@tudelft.nl. Correspondence concerning the Platform, its Content, or the present Terms should be addressed to the CAIT team at cait-ewi@tudelft.nl, which handles such matters on behalf of the institution.
2. Scope and Acceptance of the Terms
The present Terms and Conditions, together with the Privacy Statement and the Cookie Policy published on the Platform, constitute the agreement between the User and the Provider governing all access to and use of the Service. By accessing the Platform, by registering an Account, or by submitting any Content, you acknowledge that you have read, understood, and accepted these Terms in their entirety. Where you do not agree with any provision contained herein, you must refrain from using the Service. As general terms and conditions within the meaning of Articles 6:231 to 6:247 of the Dutch Civil Code (Burgerlijk Wetboek), the present Terms are made available in a manner that permits you to consult, save, and reproduce them prior to or at the moment of their acceptance, in accordance with Articles 6:233 and 6:234 of that Code. Acceptance occurs through the act of use and does not require a handwritten signature.
3. Eligibility and Account Registration
Access to the published archive in browsing mode may be available without registration. Registration of an Account, by contrast, is reserved for members of the academic community, namely educators, researchers, and affiliated staff of participating universities and institutions of higher education. Authentication is performed through SURFconext, the federated identity service used by Dutch educational and research organisations, by means of the institutional credentials issued to you by your home institution. You warrant that the information transmitted during registration is accurate, current, and complete, and that you will keep such information up to date. Responsibility for the confidentiality of your credentials rests with you, and you remain accountable for any activity conducted under your Account. Where you suspect unauthorised access, prompt notification to the Provider at cait-ewi@tudelft.nl is required. The Provider reserves the right to refuse, suspend, or withdraw registration where eligibility cannot be verified or where these Terms are contravened.
Before an Account is created, you are required to state whether your email address is to be displayed publicly on the Platform. Users whose Accounts were established prior to the introduction of that question are invited to answer it upon their next login. The consequences of either answer, and the manner in which the setting may afterwards be revised, are described in Section 10 of the present Terms and, in greater detail, in the Privacy Statement.
4. Description of the Service
CAIT enables registered Users to publish discrete units of teaching material, each described through metadata such as title, publication type, difficulty, and tags, and to organise such materials into structured sequences, referred to on the Platform as "Circuits", which express a suggested order of study. The Service further incorporates community features, including comments, ratings expressed as stars, the saving of materials, and a reputation mechanism that reflects the quantity and the perceived quality of a User's contributions. The Service is offered without charge and is intended to support the open exchange of educational resources among academic peers. The Provider may, at its discretion, add, modify, restrict, or discontinue features, in whole or in part, where doing so serves the proper functioning, the security, or the lawful operation of the Platform. No provision of these Terms shall be construed as a guarantee that any particular feature will remain permanently available.
5. Acceptable Use and User Obligations
Use of the Platform must at all times comply with applicable law, with the legitimate interests of other Users, and with the academic and collaborative purpose of the Service. In availing yourself of the Platform, you undertake to observe the following obligations.
Lawful conduct: You shall not use the Service to upload, distribute, or link to material that is unlawful, defamatory, discriminatory, harassing, or otherwise contrary to public order or good morals within the meaning of Article 3:40 of the Dutch Civil Code.
Integrity of access: You shall not attempt to gain unauthorised access to the Platform, to its underlying infrastructure, or to the Accounts of other Users, nor introduce malicious code, conduct automated scraping beyond reasonable limits, or interfere with the technical operation of the Service.
Accuracy of attribution: You shall not misrepresent your identity, your institutional affiliation, or the authorship of any Content, and you shall not claim ownership of materials that you are not entitled to publish.
Respect for confidentiality: You shall not upload examination materials, personal data of third parties, or confidential institutional documents where their disclosure would breach a duty owed to your institution or to any other party.
A breach of any obligation set out in the present Section may result in the measures described in Section 9, without prejudice to any further remedy available to the Provider at law.
6. User Content, Ownership, and Licensing
Ownership of the intellectual property rights subsisting in the Content that you submit remains with you or with the rightsholder from whom you have obtained the necessary permissions. Nothing in these Terms operates to transfer such ownership to the Provider. By submitting Content to the Platform, however, you grant to the Provider a non-exclusive, worldwide, royalty-free licence to host, store, reproduce, display, and make available that Content for the purpose of operating and promoting the Service, and you grant to other Users the right to access, view, download, adapt, and reuse that Content to the extent permitted by the licence terms that you select upon publication. Where the Platform supports the application of open licences, including those of the Creative Commons family, the licence designated by you shall govern the conditions under which other Users may reuse your Content; in the absence of an express designation, reuse shall be limited to that which is strictly necessary for personal academic consultation. You warrant that you hold all rights required to grant the foregoing licences, that your Content does not infringe the copyright, database rights, or other proprietary rights of any third party, and that any third-party material incorporated into your Content has been included lawfully and with appropriate acknowledgement. The relevant statutory framework includes the Dutch Copyright Act (Auteurswet 1912), the Database Act (Databankenwet), Directive 2001/29/EC on copyright in the information society, and Directive (EU) 2019/790 on copyright in the Digital Single Market.
Materials that you have published remain available on the Platform until you delete them or until your Account is closed. Where closure is requested, you are offered the possibility of transferring the ownership of those materials to another registered User, who thereupon assumes the rights and the responsibilities attaching to them, including the exercise of the licences described above; failing such a transfer, the materials are withdrawn together with the Account. Transfer of ownership does not alter the licence terms under which the materials were originally released, nor does it affect the copies lawfully obtained by other Users before the transfer took effect.
7. Intellectual Property of the Platform
Save for the Content contributed by Users, all rights in and to the Platform, including its software, source code, database structure, interface design, graphics, logos, and the CAIT name, belong to the Provider, to the development team Praxidike, or to their respective licensors, and are protected under the statutory instruments referenced in the preceding Section. No right or licence is granted to you in respect of such materials beyond the limited right to use the Platform in accordance with these Terms. Reproduction, decompilation, redistribution, or commercial exploitation of any element of the Platform, otherwise than as expressly permitted herein or as mandated by Article 45m of the Auteurswet concerning lawful software use, is prohibited absent the prior written consent of the Provider.
8. Reporting of Illegal or Infringing Content
Although the Provider does not exercise prior editorial control over Content submitted by Users, it operates a notice-and-action procedure consistent with its obligations as a hosting service under Regulation (EU) 2022/2065 (Digital Services Act). Any person who considers that Content available on the Platform is unlawful, infringes intellectual property rights, or otherwise contravenes these Terms may submit a substantiated notice to cait-ewi@tudelft.nl. A valid notice should contain a sufficiently precise identification of the Content in question, an explanation of the grounds on which it is alleged to be unlawful or infringing, the contact details of the notifying party, and, where the notice concerns copyright, a statement of the notifying party's good-faith belief that the use is not authorised. Upon receipt of a complete notice, the Provider will assess the matter with due diligence and may, where warranted, disable access to or remove the Content, notify the User who submitted it, and provide a statement of reasons in accordance with Article 17 of the Digital Services Act. Repeated submission of materially unfounded notices may itself constitute a misuse of the Service.
9. Content Moderation, Suspension, and Account Measures
The Provider reserves the right, acting reasonably and proportionately, to review, restrict, suspend, or remove Content, and to suspend or terminate an Account, where there are reasonable grounds to believe that a User has breached these Terms, that Content is unlawful, or that continued availability would expose the Provider, other Users, or third parties to legal or security risk. Where circumstances permit, the affected User will be informed of the measure taken and of the reasons for it, and will be afforded the opportunity to respond or to contest the decision through the contact channel identified above. Measures adopted under the present Section are without prejudice to the Provider's right to preserve evidence, to notify competent authorities where required by law, and to pursue any claim arising from the conduct in question.
10. Privacy, Personal Data, and Cookies
Processing of personal data in connection with the Platform is governed by the General Data Protection Regulation (Regulation (EU) 2016/679) and by the Dutch GDPR Implementation Act (Uitvoeringswet Algemene verordening gegevensbescherming, UAVG), and is described in detail in the CAIT Privacy Statement. The use of cookies and comparable technologies is addressed in the CAIT Cookie Policy. You acknowledge that your first name, your last name, and your platform and institutional affiliation are displayed publicly in connection with the materials you publish, in order to attribute authorship and to allow members of the academic community to identify one another.
Display of your email address follows a separate regime and depends upon the choice that you express. New Users must state their preference before the Account is created; Users registered before that mechanism was introduced retain, until they answer the question presented at their next login, the configuration previously applicable, under which the address remains visible. Whichever answer is given, the setting may be modified at any moment from the settings page of your profile, with effect for the future. Because the Platform places no cookie other than the strictly necessary one that maintains your authenticated session, no consent banner is presented; the technical particulars are set out in the Cookie Policy. The Privacy Statement and the Cookie Policy form an integral part of the present agreement, and their provisions are incorporated herein by reference.
11. Availability, Maintenance, and Absence of Warranty
The Service is provided free of charge, on an "as is" and "as available" basis, in what remains, at the date of these Terms, a development and testing environment. Production and staging environments alike operate on cloud servers rented from Hetzner Online GmbH and situated in Nuremberg, Germany, with the consequence that availability depends in part upon the performance of that supplier. Although reasonable efforts are made to maintain the Platform in good working order, the Provider does not warrant that access will be uninterrupted, that the Service will be free from errors or defects, or that any defect will be corrected within a particular time. Scheduled and unscheduled maintenance, technical limitations of third-party infrastructure, and circumstances beyond the Provider's reasonable control may affect availability. To the extent that the materials hosted on the Platform are contributed by Users, the Provider gives no warranty as to their accuracy, completeness, currency, or fitness for any educational or other purpose, and reliance upon such materials is undertaken at the User's own discretion.
12. Limitation of Liability
Given the gratuitous and academic character of the Service, the liability of the Provider is limited to the fullest extent permitted by Dutch law. The Provider shall not be liable for any indirect, consequential, or incidental loss, including loss of data, loss of reputation, or loss arising from the use of or reliance upon Content contributed by Users. Nothing in the present Section operates to exclude or limit liability for damage caused by intent or by deliberate recklessness (opzet of bewuste roekeloosheid) on the part of the Provider or its management, nor any liability that cannot be excluded under mandatory provisions of Dutch law. Where liability is nonetheless established, it shall in any event be confined to direct and foreseeable damage. The allocation of risk set out herein reflects the no-fee nature of the Service and forms an essential basis of the agreement between the parties.
13. Indemnification
You agree to hold the Provider harmless against, and to indemnify it in respect of, any third-party claim, demand, or proceeding, together with reasonable associated costs, that arises from Content you have submitted, from your use of the Service in breach of these Terms, or from your infringement of the rights of any third party. The Provider will, where practicable, notify you of any such claim and will allow you a reasonable opportunity to participate in its handling, without thereby assuming any obligation that these Terms place upon you.
14. Term, Suspension, and Termination
The agreement constituted by these Terms takes effect upon your first use of the Platform and continues until terminated. You may terminate the agreement at any time by ceasing to use the Service and by requesting the closure of your Account through the contact channel provided, whereupon the election concerning the ownership of your published materials, described in Section 6, is put to you. The Provider may suspend or terminate your access in the circumstances described in Section 9, or upon the discontinuation of the Service in whole or in part. Upon termination, the licences granted by you in respect of Content already disseminated may, where necessary to preserve the integrity of materials relied upon by other Users, subsist to the extent and for the duration permitted by the licence terms originally selected. Provisions that by their nature are intended to survive termination, including those concerning intellectual property, limitation of liability, indemnification, and governing law, shall continue in force.
15. Amendments to the Terms
The Provider may amend these Terms from time to time, in order to reflect changes in the Service, in applicable law, or in operational requirements. Where an amendment is of material significance, registered Users will be informed by a notice published on the Platform or transmitted to the email address associated with their Account, in advance of its entry into force where reasonably practicable. Continued use of the Service following the effective date of an amendment constitutes acceptance of the revised Terms. Should you not accept an amendment, your remedy is to discontinue use of the Platform and to request closure of your Account.
16. Governing Law, Jurisdiction, and Dispute Resolution
The present Terms, and any non-contractual obligations arising in connection with them, are governed by the law of the Netherlands. Any dispute that cannot be resolved amicably shall be submitted to the competent court of the District Court of The Hague (Rechtbank Den Haag), within whose jurisdiction the Provider is established, without prejudice to any mandatory protection to which a User qualifying as a consumer may be entitled under the law of his or her country of residence, including the right to bring or defend proceedings before the courts of that country. With respect to alternative routes of redress, Users are advised that the European Online Dispute Resolution platform, formerly maintained under Regulation (EU) No 524/2013, was discontinued on 20 July 2025 pursuant to Regulation (EU) 2024/3228, and is therefore no longer available. Parties are nonetheless encouraged to seek an amicable settlement, in the first instance by directing any complaint to cait-ewi@tudelft.nl, before resorting to judicial proceedings.
17. Final Provisions
Should any provision of these Terms be held invalid, void, or unenforceable, the remaining provisions shall continue in full force and effect, and the provision concerned shall be replaced by a valid provision that approximates as closely as possible the intended economic and legal purpose of the original. The failure of the Provider to enforce any right or provision shall not constitute a waiver of that right or provision. You may not assign or transfer your rights or obligations under these Terms without the prior written consent of the Provider, whereas the Provider may assign its rights and obligations in connection with a transfer of the operation of the Platform, subject to the safeguards required by law. Together with the Privacy Statement and the Cookie Policy, the present document sets out the entire agreement between the parties in respect of the Service and supersedes any prior understanding relating to its subject matter. Questions regarding these Terms may be addressed to the CAIT team at cait-ewi@tudelft.nl.