For institutional clients, this Service Level Agreement (“SLA”) mirrors Exhibit B of the Services Agreement (the “Agreement”) entered into between OpenScholar, LLC (“OpenScholar”) and the Institution. Any capitalized terms not defined herein shall have the meaning given to such term in the Agreement. In the event of a conflict between this SLA and the Agreement, the Agreement will control.
OpenScholar may engage third party service providers for data storage and housing of servers, including Amazon Web Services (AWS) for file storage and the location and support of self-managed servers. OpenScholar uses commercially reasonable efforts to require these third party service providers to maintain industry standard levels of security and reliability for the Sites. Access to the Institution’s data is restricted to employees and contractors trained by OpenScholar. Such employees and contractors are given access to the Institution’s data only to the extent necessary to provide maintenance and support.
OpenScholar’s goal is to ensure that the Services are available to the Institution twenty-four hours a day, seven days per week, three hundred sixty-five days per year.
OpenScholar guarantees a monthly 99.5% availability of hosted Sites, except in cases of the following:
- as a result of scheduled outages, of which the Institution has been notified, and that are completed outside of the Institution’s normal business hours;
- due to Institution-authored code, user-generated content, outages or errors caused by third party service providers, or changes to DNS, the Platform or Services by parties other than OpenScholar;
- data center interruptions related to acts of God, natural disasters, or outside the control of OpenScholar’s third party service providers;
- as a result of factors outside of OpenScholar’s reasonable control, including any force majeure event.
OpenScholar may engage third party service providers for help desk support and ticketing systems as well as system administration. All support is handled via email at support@theopenscholar.com.
End-user email support (i.e., faculty, staff, student, department) is provided Monday-Friday 9:00am-5:00pm EST via emailed support request ticket. Video chat appointments are available by request. The Institution is encouraged to forward support requests from end users should additional help be needed to resolve any issues.
Below are the definitions of the levels and expectations of response time after a level is assigned:
- Level 1 – Urgent
Complete inability to access or use the Platform, both front and back ends. - Level 2 – High
Front end is available, but back end is such that updates to Sites can’t be made. - Level 3 – Normal
Partial or limited loss of non-essential functionality affecting all users, e.g. users are not able to upload files. - Level 4 – Low
Inconvenience but not impacting general performance. For example, users are unable to add widgets or upload images, but the Site is otherwise up and running without errors.
While OpenScholar will work to reply to all support requests, at all levels, as quickly and completely as possible, the following SLA guarantees are in place:
Level 1 – 1st reply within 30 minutes during business hours with updates posted hourly to the status page at https://status.theopenscholar.com until resolution. Outside of business hours, help desk staff are not available to respond to emails but the servers are monitored for level 1 outages and updates are posted to the status page.
Level 2 – 1st reply within 1 business day with updates every two business days until resolution.
Level 3 – 1st reply within 1 business day with updates when there is a resolution.
Level 4 – 1st reply within 1 business day with updates when there is a resolution.
OpenScholar will maintain a list of Level 1 outages that affect a significant number of customers at https://status.theopenscholar.com. End-users may subscribe to receive email notifications about service incidents.
The Institution agrees to keep OpenScholar informed of all current contact information for the Institution’s account. Changes in the Institution’s account information may be reported to OpenScholar by email at support@theopenscholar.com.
Effective date: April 25, 2024