Terms of service
The agreement between you and The Research Brief.
What you are buying
A subscription to The Research Brief — one issue a week, published Sunday morning UK time. The free tier gives you This Week in Brief and the Editor’s View. A paid membership gives you every section of every issue from the day it is published. Every issue also becomes free to read in full on the website four weeks after publication.
Membership costs £5 per month, or £50 per year. Prices include VAT. Readers outside the UK are billed in their own currency, with local tax included.
Payment is taken by Onelink, Stripe’s payments service, which acts as the merchant of record for your subscription and issues your receipt and VAT invoice. The Research Brief remains responsible for the publication itself and for everything else in these terms. You can manage or cancel your subscription from your account page at any time.
The free month
We sometimes offer a free month of the full Brief, for example to people who comment on one of our Instagram posts. It gives every section of every issue for 30 days from the moment you confirm your email address. No card is taken, so nothing is ever charged and there is nothing to cancel. It is limited to one free month per email address and one per Instagram account, and is not available to current or past paying members. Each offer link works once and expires 7 days after it is sent. When the month ends we send one email inviting you to subscribe; if you do not, we stop emailing you. We may withdraw the offer at any time, without affecting a free month that has already started.
This is not financial advice
The Research Brief is editorial commentary and general information only. It does not constitute investment advice, nor a personal recommendation to buy or sell any financial instrument. Capital is at risk and past performance is not a guide to future performance. You should seek advice from an independent, regulated financial adviser before making any investment decisions. This publication is not authorised or regulated by the Financial Conduct Authority (FCA).
Nothing in an issue is a personal recommendation. It is written for a general readership and takes no account of your circumstances, objectives or attitude to risk.
Cancelling
You can cancel at any time from your account page. There is no notice period, no retention call and no exit survey. When you cancel, your membership runs to the end of the period you have already paid for, and then stops — we do not cut off access on the day you cancel, because you paid for that period.
We do not issue partial refunds for the remainder of a period as a matter of course. If something has gone wrong, write to hello@theresearchbrief.co.uk and we will deal with it sensibly.
If a payment fails
Your card issuer is retried for several days before anything changes. We do not remove access on a first failed attempt — an expired card should not cost you the issue you paid for. If payment ultimately fails, membership lapses at the end of the paid period.
What you may do with an issue
Read it, quote it with attribution, and forward the occasional issue to a colleague. What you may not do is republish it in full, put it behind someone else’s paywall, or feed it into a product that redistributes it. Copyright in every issue remains with The Research Brief.
Sharing your sign-in link so several people read on one membership is a breach of these terms. We would rather talk to you about a team rate.
Availability
We aim to publish every week and to keep the site up, but we do not guarantee either. Occasionally an issue will be late, or held back entirely, because a fact in it could not be verified in time. We consider that the right trade — a late issue is recoverable, a wrong one is not.
Ending your access
We may end a membership that is being used to redistribute issues, or that is abusive toward whoever answers the inbox. If we do, we will refund the unused part of the period.
Governing law
These terms are governed by the law of England and Wales, and the courts of England and Wales have exclusive jurisdiction.
Contact
The Research Brief, London — hello@theresearchbrief.co.uk.