Prophy Inc. (“Prophy”, “Prophy Services” or “Services”) is committed to maintaining your confidence and trust with respect to your privacy. Please read this privacy policy carefully to understand our practices regarding your personal information.
We collect and use your personal data during your use of the Prophy Science in accordance with the EU General Data Protection Regulation (GDPR) and related national data protection legislations. If, however, you would like to make a query regarding our privacy policy, please contact us.
This privacy policy applies when you visit or use our websites and other services (each, a “Service”). It also describes your choices regarding use, access and correction of your personal information. If you do not agree with the terms of this privacy policy, do not access or use the Services. This privacy policy may be supplemented by additional privacy statements, terms or notices provided to you.
This privacy policy does not apply to any third party applications or software that integrates with the Services, or any other third party products, services or businesses (“Third Party Services”). In addition, a separate agreement may govern delivery, access and use of the Services (the “User Agreement”), including the processing of any content submitted through your use of the Services (collectively, “User Data”). User Data may include, among other things, your name, user name, address, email address, academic or other professional affiliation, digital object identifier, and other contact and demographic information when you register and set up an account, fill out a form, submit a comment or contact us by e-mail or other means. The organization (e.g., your employer or another entity or person) that entered into the User Agreement (“User”) controls the content submitted through the Services and any associated User Data.
We collect information about you in three ways: directly from your input, from third-party sources, and through automated technologies.
The types of personal information that we collect directly from you depends on the content and features of the Service you use and how you otherwise interact with us and may include:
We obtain academic information from publicly-available sources and data suppliers. This includes information such as author names, affiliations, publication history, and publicly available contact information, for creating comprehensive and accurate author profiles.
This data may be combined with other information we collect and might include aggregate level data
We cannot control the actions of other users with whom you may choose to share your information. Therefore, we cannot and do not guarantee that your information will not be viewed by unauthorized persons. You understand that when you use public areas of the Services, your information will be available to other users and in some cases may be publicly available.
We are cautious about not providing any information beyond publically available academic information (names, affiliations, authorship) that we have in our possession whether provided by you or generated automatically by our services
The Prophy Services may also automatically collect information about how you and your device interact with the Service, such as:
We do not collect or process bank accounts, credit card details, debit card details or any information regarding payment services. Such information is collected and processed by our partners – payment services providers and they have full responsibility for its protection.
We collect data through our servers and the use of cookies and other technologies. You can control cookies through your browser's settings and other tools. However, if you choose to block certain cookies, you may not be able to register, login, or access certain parts or make full usage of the Service. We use cookies to track website use to help us learn how well the Services perform. We also use cookies to understand, improve and research products, features and services, including to create logs and record when you access the Services from different devices, such as your work computer or your mobile device. We use Google Analytics tools.
For more information, please see https://marketingplatform.google.com/about/analytics/terms/us/. We also use a custom cookie for keeping you logged in when using Prophy.
Some information in the Services may be disclosed, and not be deleted, when it is believed to be important for academic and research purpose. Research communications heavily depend on publications, and information relevant to publications is in general important for the Services, users, and their studies. Among various pieces of personal information relevant to a publication record, we believe, to the extent permitted by applicable law and the correspondent license under which the record is shared, at least the real names of authors, their affiliations, and their bibliographic metrics such as h-index and received citations are academic information.
We collect author names as publicly accessible metadata from the web, publishers and other sources for display across our website including in association with papers, presentations, blog posts, code repositories, videos and citations/references. To maintain the accuracy and integrity of the author disambiguation process, which is essential for the correct attribution of publications and the overall functioning of the Service, profile data including names, affiliations, publication links, and other algorithmic inputs are retained. Deleting or fully anonymizing profiles associated with known publications, even inactive ones, can lead to the misattribution of those publications to other researchers, compromising the reliability of the Service. Therefore, this data is retained for as long as necessary to support these core system integrity functions. We use the author name from this publicly accessible metadata to auto-generate author profile pages where we display content associated with an author, compute citation statistics and display links to other authors. Author profile pages can be updated via Profile page.
Our Website provides for a free account registration by which you will be able to perform semantic searches, bookmark interesting papers, monitor scientific information streams, and get access to new features as they launch.
Upon registration we collect your names, email and information whether you are a student, researcher, science enthusiast or other. We need those data for individualization and authentication purposes, services provision, security purposes, and contact correspondence if necessary. You can at any time change this information through the functionalities of your account.
We also collect and process data in order to provide and manage the Services you have requested. Our goal is to help scientists optimize their research processes, so our Services provide you with AI tailored tools aiming to improve your researchers’ experience.
In addition to services for registered users, a core purpose of our processing is to aggregate publicly available academic information (as described above) to create accurate, disambiguated professional profiles of researchers. These profiles, including derived data like calculated expertise relevance and conflict-of-interest checks, are made available through our Services to help authorized users (such as journals, funders, and research institutions) identify potentially suitable reviewers for scientific manuscripts and grant proposals efficiently and accurately. This processing supports the integrity and efficiency of the scientific peer-review process.
Users of our reviewer identification service may apply filters to their search results based on data contained within the author profiles, such as affiliation country or bibliometric indicators, to refine their search for suitable reviewers according to specific needs (e.g., language requirements, expertise levels, or institutional policies).
We have implemented all kinds of technical and organizational measures to ensure that processing is carried out in accordance with the GDPR, including:
These measures are designed to implement data protection principles, such as data minimization, in an effective manner and to integrate the necessary safeguards into the processing in order to meet the requirements of the Regulation and protect your rights.
In case you wish to verify which personal data are stored by the Prophy System, have it modified, corrected, or deleted, or restrict the processing, or object to it or to exercise the right to data portability, please contact us at [email protected].
You have the right to object (Article 21 GDPR) to processing based on legitimate interests. If you object to the processing of your profile data for reviewer identification, please contact us at [email protected]. While the technical need to retain certain data linkages to prevent misattribution may limit full deletion in some cases (as explained under 'Academic Information'), we will mark your profile accordingly to ensure it is no longer processed or displayed for reviewer suggestion purposes.
If you would like to receive further information related to the processing of your personal data and/or to exercise your rights mentioned above, you can contact the responsible person by using the contact information mentioned above, and by explicitly specifying your request.
If you believe that any information about you is false or inaccurate, please inform us as soon as possible writing to [email protected].
Article 6(1) lit. b GDPR serves as the legal basis for processing operations where processing of Personal data is necessary for the performance of a contract to which you are party, as is the case of account registration. The same applies to such processing operations where processing of Personal data is necessary for carrying out pre-contractual measures.
Art. 6(1) lit. a GDPR serves as the legal basis for processing operations where we have obtained your consent for a specific processing purpose, as is the case when you opt-in for updates.
For the processing activities related to aggregating publicly available academic information, creating researcher profiles, calculating relevance scores, and providing the reviewer identification service to our customers, we rely on Legitimate Interests (Article 6(1)(f) GDPR). Our legitimate interests are: facilitating the efficiency and relevance of the scientific peer-review process for the benefit of researchers, publishers, funders, and the scientific community; and maintaining the accuracy and integrity of our disambiguation algorithms and profile data. We have conducted a Legitimate Interests Assessment and concluded that our interests are not overridden by the interests or fundamental rights and freedoms of the data subjects, taking into account the professional nature of the data, its public availability, the benefits provided, and the safeguards implemented (including transparency and the right to object).