Legal & ethics
Withdrawal policy
You can withdraw at any point, without giving a reason. What can be deleted depends on when you withdraw, and we state that plainly rather than promising more than we can deliver.
How to withdraw
Use the withdrawal control in your portal, tell the coordinator during a session, or contact the project. No justification is required, nothing is asked in return, and your standing in the programme is unaffected.
Withdrawal is acknowledged in writing within five working days, with a statement of exactly what was deleted and what, if anything, was retained.
What happens, by stage
Before a session
Withdrawal is immediate and complete. The scheduled assignment is voided, and the record shows only that a session was not conducted.
During a session
Say so, or use the stop control. Recording ends at once. You choose whether the partial recording and transcript are destroyed or retained as a partial record; the default is destruction.
After submission, before judging
Your material is removed from the judging pool and excluded from analysis. The exclusion is logged and reported as a protocol deviation with its stated reason.
After judging, before publication
Identifying material is deleted. Coded material may be retained if removing it would invalidate the preregistered analysis; where it is retained, the report states that a participant withdrew and what was kept.
After publication
Identifying material is deleted on request. Published coded datasets cannot be retracted from third parties who already hold them, and the scientific record is not rewritten.
Limits we are honest about
Some records must be retained to satisfy research-integrity and applicable legal requirements: consent documents, audit entries and the fact that a withdrawal occurred. These are retained in coded form and are never used for further analysis of your material.
Audit and exposure logs are append-only by design. They record actions, not session content, and they cannot be edited or erased — including by administrators.