Part 2 · Oversight and governance
2.1Roles and permissions
A review lives in your personal library or in a team workspace. In a workspace, what each person may do follows one of five built-in roles; this chapter lists the roles, every permission each one holds, how people join and leave, and what the workspace records about them.
What it does
Axelium supports solo reviews and team reviews. Team mode adds roles, assignments, blinded decisions, conflict adjudication, comments, notifications, and milestone sign-off while preserving the same audit trail used in single-reviewer projects. A workspace has five built-in roles — Admin, Lead Reviewer, Reviewer, Commenter and Viewer — and each is a fixed bundle of permissions: what a person may do in every review of the workspace follows their role there, never the review itself. Nobody hands out more than they hold: a lead reviewer invites people to a role no higher than their own. The AI holds no role. It acts for the review's owner within what the review's settings allow, and every step it takes is recorded as its own, never under a person's name.
What you do
Personal libraries and team workspaces
Personal reviews suit solo work; a team adds roles, assignments, independent decisions, comments and approval checkpoints.
Every team review has an owner: the person its scheduled updates run for and who receives its alerts. Workspace admins can transfer a review to a lead reviewer or admin of the workspace from the review's overview page — do this when the owner leaves the team. Transferring a review does not change what members can do. Removing someone from a workspace removes their access to its reviews, including the ones they created — transfer those first. Someone removed can be invited again.
Invitations
Admins and lead reviewers invite people from the team page — a lead reviewer to a role no higher than their own. Invitations arrive by email. Each link works once and for seven days. If an email doesn't arrive, the team page lets you resend it — the new link replaces the old one — or, if the email could not be sent, copy the link and share it yourself.
Deleting a team
A team's admins can delete it from the bottom of its team page. Each of its reviews then becomes a personal review of the person who created it, and the other members lose access to it; everyone leaves the team, pending invitations are cancelled, and the team's own review methods are deleted. Deleting a team cannot be undone. A team with an active subscription cancels it from its Billing page first.
Roles
Admin
Manages team membership, billing handoff, role changes, and final governance decisions.
Lead Reviewer
Owns the day-to-day review: starting reviews in the workspace, protocol edits, running the statistical analysis, generating reports, workload assignment, conflict adjudication, importing published risk-of-bias assessments, milestone requests, and inviting people as lead reviewers or reviewers.
Reviewer
Screens records, retrieves and uploads full texts, reviews extracted data, runs and reviews risk-of-bias assessments, resolves assigned work, and participates in dual-review workflows.
Commenter
Reads the review and comments on it, without screening or extracting. It is listed with the roles but is not offered when a role is assigned; it holds what a viewer holds.
Viewer
Reads progress, evidence, reports, and audit trail without changing review state.
The owner of a personal review holds everything an admin holds in it. Admins, lead reviewers and reviewers take an author seat on the workspace's plan; commenters and viewers do not (see Billing and usage).
Permissions by role
A role either holds a permission or not; a review cannot add one for a particular person. Who may approve at each approval point follows from this table and is listed in Approvals, locks and sign-off.
| Permission | What it allows | Admin | Lead Reviewer | Reviewer | Commenter | Viewer |
|---|---|---|---|---|---|---|
| Manage the workspace | Manage the workspace, approve sign-offs and moderate comments | ● | – | – | – | – |
| Configure a review | Change a review's settings and assignments | ● | ● | – | – | – |
| Adjudicate | Resolve disagreements between reviewers | ● | ● | – | – | – |
| Review | Screen records and extract data | ● | ● | ● | – | – |
| View | See reviews and their working data | ● | ● | ● | ● | ● |
| Start a review | Start new reviews | ● | ● | – | – | – |
| Edit the protocol | Edit a review's protocol | ● | ● | – | – | – |
| Delete a review | Delete reviews | ● | – | – | – | – |
| Request sign-off and lock | Lock a review's methods and request sign-off | ● | ● | – | – | – |
| Decide at screening | Record screening decisions | ● | ● | ● | – | – |
| Rule on screening conflicts | Resolve screening disagreements | ● | ● | – | – | – |
| Review extracted data | Submit extraction reviews | ● | ● | ● | – | – |
| Rule on extraction conflicts | Resolve extraction disagreements | ● | ● | – | – | – |
| Invite people | Invite people, never to a role above their own | ● | ● | – | – | – |
| Remove a member | Remove people from the workspace | ● | – | – | – | – |
| Change a role | Change people's roles | ● | – | – | – | – |
| Manage review methods | Create, publish and retire the workspace's review methods and templates | ● | ● | – | – | – |
| Review a risk-of-bias assessment | Submit risk-of-bias reviews | ● | ● | ● | – | – |
| Run risk-of-bias assessments | Run risk-of-bias assessments | ● | ● | ● | – | – |
| Import published assessments | Import published risk-of-bias assessments | ● | ● | – | – | – |
| Re-run reviewed assessments | Re-run risk-of-bias assessments over reviewed ones | ● | ● | – | – | – |
| Propose for publication | Propose a signed-off review for the organisation's library | ● | ● | – | – | – |
Notifications
Mentions in comments, assignments, conflicts that need a ruling, rulings made, sign-off requests and completed sign-offs, proposals and search strategies waiting for review, and living-review alerts appear in the notification inbox. Email delivery follows your notification preferences — each kind sent at once, in a digest or not at all — while urgent review decisions stay visible in the app until they are handled.
Settings
A role is set when someone is invited and changed by an admin from the team page. How work is shared among the people who hold a role — the review mode, assignments and the screening policy — is described in Review settings and Screening. Your own notification preferences are set under Settings › Notifications.
What is recorded
| Record | Where you see it | Exported in |
|---|---|---|
| Who acted and in what role at the time, on every approval, decision, lock and sign-off | Sign-off status › History; Versions | Sign-off export (CSV and NDJSON) |
| Each member’s current role, and each invitation still open, with the role it names | Team page | — |
| A review’s transfer to a new owner: who transferred it, from whom to whom, and when | Review overview (the current owner) | — |
An approval event keeps the actor's name and role as they were at the time, so a later change of role never rewrites the record. The whole record is described in Audit trail and history.
Limits
A role applies to the whole workspace: a person cannot hold one role in one review and another in the next. A workspace cannot define roles of its own. A commenter cannot be assigned.