Privacy Policy

We collect, store, and process various forms of data from and about you, our user and community member. Some of this data we provide through our public API to everyone to use, some we keep private, and some we keep anonymized. This document tries to explain this in more detail. If you have any concerns with how we deal with data, please contact us, open a ticket for public discussion, or open a pull request with a proposed change.

Public data you contribute.

Public data you contribute (your public publications, public metadata, public annotations, public comments, etc.) is available to everyone through our public API and is associated with your user account. This includes all past versions of any public data as well.

Public data we compute about you.

Based on public data you contribute, we compute various additional data which we provide to other users on PeerLibrary and through our public API. An example of this data is site reputation points (karma points).

Private data you store in PeerLibrary.

Private data you store in PeerLibrary (your private publications, private metadata, private annotations, private comments, etc.) is available only to you and those you decide to share private data with. Access to your private data through public API is possible only if you allow a 3rd party application to connect to PeerLibrary in your name. Your private data is not stored encrypted on our servers and can be provided to law officials when legally obliged. In addition, in extreme circumstances, your private data can be accessed by administrators. In such cases we will try to keep privacy intrusion to minimum. An example of such extreme circumstance is database recovery operation where administrators would have to determine if restored data looks sensible.

Your user account.

When you create a PeerLibrary user account, we gather some personal information about you. Some of this data is publicly displayed on your profile page. In addition, we collect information every time you sign into PeerLibrary. We collect information such as IP from where the sign in request came from and related information. We collect and use this information to detect possible break in attempts and in general provide security to PeerLibrary site and users. We keep this data private and available only to administrators. Do understand that signing in effectively means you want us to keep track of your session and store a cookie or something similar in your browser to be able to do that. If you want to keep your use of PeerLibrary as private as possible, do not sign in and enable do-not-track in your browser.

When an error happens.

When an error happens in your browser while using PeerLibrary, we try to log information about the error with additional information about the context and environment (your browser) in which the error occurred. If the user is signed in, we associate the error with the user to allow possible follow up questions we might have. We collect this data to be able to remove errors for our users as soon as possible. We keep this data private and available only to administrators.

How you use PeerLibrary, how you interact with user interface and navigate around.

We store this data independently and unlinked to any information about users. We collect this data for both signed in and not signed in users. We collect this data with hopes of improving PeerLibrary user experience and learning more about how academic publications are read and interacted with and maybe even determining new ways of evaluating publications. Because data could be potentially linked back to users by correlating data with public interactions with PeerLibrary (like publishing an annotation) we are currently keeping this data private and available only to administrators. We have to think more about this because we would like for it to become a useful source for all researchers to use. Aggregated data (like PeerLibrary usage statistics) and other results based on heavy processing of this data we share publicly.

Privacy Policy History

History of our privacy policy is available in our source code repository.