Cleaning the Tap Room
beer and bezos; terms-of-service and privacy-policy updates; more deployment options; compliance requirements and country restrictions; a blog post about transition states
"Focus on what makes your beer taste better." — Jeff Bezos
Our goal at Rowan is to make tools that put amazing theoretical and algorithmic advances in the hands of scientists at every level. We try to devote as much of our time as possible to this goal—so much so that our team almost exclusively focuses on applied research, software development, product building, and science-focused communication. To borrow from Bezos’s terminology, we think this is what makes Rowan’s beer taste better.
However, there’s a time and a place for dealing with the complexities of the real world, and we’re taking a moment to revisit a few items that have been demanding our attention: our terms of service, our privacy policy, and our geographic coverage. (To extend Bezos’s metaphor, we think this is akin to cleaning the tap room. I [Ari] used to work at a microbrewery in Texas, and it takes a lot of work to keep a tap room clean!)
Terms of Service and Privacy Policy
We’ve updated our Terms of Service and our Privacy Policy. All existing Rowan users will be notified of these updates when they log into our platform. We’ve aimed to keep the language concise while adding important clarifications. The updated Terms of Service provide more detail throughout, including around billing and the rights we do and don’t retain over user content. The revised Privacy Policy includes clearer information on what personal data we collect (and don’t), how we use it, and your rights regarding that data.
Importantly, we haven’t changed the following items:
We don’t sell your personal information, and we share your personal information only when it’s necessary to provide and improve our services, when we’re required by law, or with your permission.
We never sell or share your molecular data, and the only rights we retain are solely to provide services to you. (Among other things, this means we don’t train models on your molecular data unless that’s a service we’re specifically providing to you.)
We understand that chemical research can be extremely IP-sensitive, and we care a lot about protecting all of our users’ data and trade secrets. If you have questions or concerns about anything in our terms of service or privacy policy, please let us know at contact@rowansci.com—we’d love to talk!
(Disclaimer for lawyers and other litigious persons: this post should in no way be taken to override our Terms of Service and Privacy Policy as written. Any contradictions are accidents.)
Deployment Options
We often talk with scientists who work for large companies and are curious about they can bring Rowan to their organization. Working with enterprises is different than working with individuals or startups: we offer a range of deployment options to satisfy legal, IT, and security requirements, with the goal of being as easy to work with as possible.
To learn more about how companies can work with Rowan’s platform, you can read our overview of all our deployment options here.
Geographic Coverage
Rowan is a US-based company, and like all such companies, we must comply with US and international laws and regulations—including those that affect where we can operate and offer paid services.
As a result, we’re currently limiting access to Rowan’s subscription plans to certain countries to ensure we remain compliant with tax and trade regulations. At the moment, our subscription plans are available in:
The United States
The United Kingdom
European Union member states, Switzerland, and Norway
If you live elsewhere and are interested in a paid subscription tier, please reach out to us at contact@rowansci.com. We’re always looking for ways to support the global scientific community while honoring our legal obligations.
Additionally, we’re limiting any type of access to the Rowan platform to specific regions to manage our global compliance and risk. The Rowan platform can be accessed from:
Canada
Mexico
Puerto Rico and other US territories and jurisdictions
The British Virgin Islands
Brazil
Israel
The United Arab Emirates
Saudi Arabia
India
The Republic of Korea
Japan
Taiwan
The Philippines
Singapore
Australia
We’re enforcing these changes via a new field on account creation, IP geofencing, and address checks on payment.
We recognize that these changes aren’t the most exciting thing, but we think it’s important to be as transparent as possible regarding anything that impacts users. If any of these changes affect you negatively, we want to hear from you.
Transition-State Guesses
Several months ago, Jonathon (our director of computational chemistry) wrote a long and informative guide to understanding reactions, potential-energy surfaces, and transition states. This week, he released a companion guide to transition-state searching, complete with real-life examples and visual overviews. If you’ve ever felt confused by QST3, NEB, GSM, and all the other TS-finding algorithms, check it out!
While we’ve been implementing these changes, we’ve also been working on lots of new scientific and product features that we can’t wait to share soon. Until then, happy computing!