Terms of Service

The agreement

By using this website or registering for one of our programs, you agree to these terms. If you do not agree with them, do not register. That is the whole of it.

If you are under the age of majority in your province, you should read these terms with a parent or guardian before you register.

What we offer

Join Research Canada is a student-led nonprofit running research education programs. Research 101 is a free four-week online workshop led by university mentors. The Symposium is a student research competition. We also publish free written guides and, in future, a free interview series.

Our core programs are free. There is no registration fee and no cost during the program. If anyone asks you to pay for access to Research 101, it is not us. Tell us.

Who can take part

• Research 101 is built for high school students. There is no experience requirement and no minimum grade.
• You can join from anywhere in the world. Sessions run online and every one is recorded.
• The Symposium has a high school division and a university division. Eligibility rules for each will be published with the full details.
• Mentors must accurately describe their role, institution, and field when applying.

We can decline or end a registration if someone gives us false information, behaves in a way that harms other participants, or otherwise breaks these terms. We will tell you why.

What we need from you

• Give accurate information when you register. Cohort places are limited, and a fake registration takes a place from a real student.
• Treat other participants and mentors decently. Harassment, discrimination, and abuse get you removed, and that is not a warning system.
• Do not submit anyone else's work as your own, in a program or at the Symposium.
• Do not record, republish, or resell our sessions or materials without asking us first.
• Do not attempt to disrupt, overload, scrape, or gain unauthorised access to this site or our systems.

Your research belongs to you

You own everything you create. Registering for a program, or entering the Symposium, does not transfer ownership of your research to us. It never will.

We ask for one narrow permission, and only when it applies. If you enter work into the Symposium or agree to have your project featured, you give us permission to display that work and your name in connection with the event and our reporting on it. You can withdraw that permission by emailing us, and we will stop using it going forward.

We will not publish your work under our own name, licence it to anyone else, or use it commercially. If a publication opportunity comes out of the Symposium, it is offered to you and the decision is yours.

Our materials

The content of this website, our program materials, and our written guides belong to Join Research Canada, except where we have credited someone else. You are welcome to read them, use them for your own learning, and quote them with attribution. You may not republish them as your own or sell them.

Some images on this site are used under Creative Commons licences and are credited where they appear, with a link to the licence. Those images are governed by their own licences, not by these terms. Institution names and logos are the trademarks of their owners.

What our mentions of other people do not mean

This one matters, so it gets its own section.

• We name the universities our mentors study, teach, and research at. Our mentors take part as individuals. This is not a partnership with, sponsorship by, or endorsement from those institutions, and we do not claim otherwise.
• We name researchers who have agreed to take part in our interview series. Agreeing to be interviewed is not an endorsement of our organization, our programs, or any outcome you might get from them.
• We link to independent news coverage about us. Those publications reported on us. They did not endorse us, and we do not control what they write.

What we do not promise

We will be direct about this, because programs in this space routinely are not.

• We do not guarantee admission to any university, scholarship, internship, or job. Nobody honestly can, and anyone who does is selling something.
• We do not guarantee that your research will be published. Publication depends on the work and on editors, neither of which we control.
• We do not guarantee a specific mentor, a specific session time, or a place in a specific cohort. We run on volunteers and demand varies.
• We may change program dates, formats, or content, or cancel a run. If we do, we will tell registered participants directly and as early as we can.
• Our written guides are educational, not professional advice on your particular situation.

The Symposium

The Symposium is scheduled for Winter 2027, in person in downtown Toronto, with a high school division and a university division. Prizes are expected to include cash, publication opportunities, and internships.

Full details, including dates, entry rules, judging criteria, and prize amounts, are still being confirmed. Nothing on our Symposium page is a binding offer until we publish the complete rules. Those rules will govern the event and will take priority over this section if they differ.

Links to other sites

We link to news articles, university pages, and other external sites. We do not control them and we are not responsible for their content or their privacy practices. A link is a pointer, not a recommendation of everything on the other end.

Liability

We provide this website and our free programs on an as-is basis. To the fullest extent the law allows, we are not liable for indirect or consequential losses arising from your use of the site or participation in a program.

We are not trying to sign away rights you cannot sign away. Consumer protection law in Ontario and elsewhere gives you protections that no website's terms can remove, and nothing here is intended to limit them. Where any part of this section conflicts with a right you have by law, the law wins and the rest of these terms still stand.

Changes and ending things

We may update these terms. The date at the top shows the current version, and if a change is significant we will say so rather than editing quietly.

You can stop using the site or leave a program at any time by emailing us. There is nothing to cancel and no fee, because there was never a charge.

Governing law

These terms are governed by the laws of the Province of Ontario and the federal laws of Canada that apply there. Disputes belong to the courts of Ontario. If you are outside Canada, you are still welcome in our programs, and this is simply where the agreement sits.

If a court finds any part of these terms unenforceable, that part is severed and everything else continues to apply.

Contact

Questions about these terms, or anything else, go to info@joinresearch.ca. A member of the student team that runs Join Research Canada will answer.