IST research scoring service: terms of use

Research access

We offer free IST scoring to noncommercial research teams funded by The Consciousness Foundation (COFO), for up to 100 participants per team per request. Institutional affiliation is required. Larger requests and requests from other teams require a custom agreement. Ego-development stage scoring is a separate paid service from LeadershipMaturity.ai. Its subsidized COFO research rate is €20 per completed 36-stem assessment for stage and Total Weighted Score (TWS) only. Maturity indicators and coaching comments are part of a fuller report, priced separately; see LeadershipMaturity.ai pricing.

Please contact us from your institutional email address with your study description, COFO funding reference, participant count, and the number of assessments or written accounts per participant. We confirm the scope before you submit participant responses. If your institution does not provide an email address, include your affiliation for verification. No account registration is required.

Grant funding and publication in a commercial journal do not by themselves make a scientific study commercial. Freedom from Fusion and Concern Preservation are research instruments and will not be sold. Commercial assessment services, use in commercial products and business operational assessment are outside this research service.

Attribution

Publications, preprints and reports using Freedom from Fusion scores must cite both Madl & Cook-Greuter (2026), which describes the derivation of the scoring dimensions, and Madl & Lazar (2026), which describes and validates IST. Work using Concern Preservation alone must cite Madl & Lazar (2026). Work using ego-development stage scores must cite Madl & Cook-Greuter (2026). We supply the relevant references with your results. Full references.

Preparing and submitting data

Use email to arrange scoring. Participant files must be submitted through the encrypted file-transfer route provided for your study, not as email attachments.

Send only de-identified material that you have permission to submit for this research processing. Remove names, contact details and identifying places, dates or other details about participants and third persons. Preserve relevant context using relationships and relative timing. Files containing identifying information are deleted unscored; you will be asked to resend a de-identified version.

Keep study conditions and occasion labels separate from response text. Identify the requested assessment: Freedom from Fusion, Concern Preservation, or both.

Processing and deletion

We accept de-identified research text only. Files are transferred over an encrypted connection and processed on OFAI-operated servers in Vienna. Access to submitted text is restricted to Tamas Madl, who runs the scoring service, and files and results are deleted after delivery.

Submitted texts are not sent to a public cloud or commercial AI provider.

Submitted texts are not used for training, tuning or evaluation, and are not retained for future research. Keep your own copy of the inputs and results. We keep only administrative records of job size, date and scoring version.

If you collect responses with Google Forms, your lab controls those forms and spreadsheets under its own arrangements. The supplied builders make no scoring calls and send nothing to us. These service processing commitments apply to the files you subsequently submit for scoring.

Results and independent research

Results describe freedom from fusion and concern preservation expressed in the supplied accounts. They do not establish clinical diagnoses or verify conduct. For repeated assessments, request a consistent scoring version throughout the study.

Researchers may publish positive, negative and null findings, criticism and independent evaluations. No coauthorship, approval of findings, collaboration or contribution of data to our research is required. Authorship on collaborative projects depends on substantive contributions.

These terms cover the scoring service and supplied administration forms. Access to operational scoring materials and rights to third-party materials are outside these service terms.

Contact

For scoring requests, commercial applications or questions: tamas.madl@ofai.at.