Privacy Notice

1. Who is responsible for the service?

Controller: University of Bern
Address: Hochschulstrasse 6, 3012 Bern, Switzerland
Service operator: Planetary formation group, Division of Space Research and Planetary Sciences, University of Bern
Service/privacy contact: contact@rxiv-hub.org
University of Bern Data Protection Office: datenschutz.rechtsdienst@unibe.ch

2. What information do we process?

• Account information: first name, last name, email address, account-verification status and password hash. Your ORCID is optional.
• Research-profile information: bibliographic identifiers (including bibcodes) classified as included, suggested or excluded; papers that you manually add; and information needed to match your profile with new preprints.
• Recommendation information: scores used to rank candidate preprints for your profile and the recommendation lists produced for current and previous weeks.
• Email preference: whether you have chosen to receive the optional weekly recommendation email.
• Interaction information: date/time of account access, displayed feed pages and, for recommended papers, positive/negative ratings, abstract-reveal actions, paper/PDF-link actions, on-screen reading time, optional written comments and associated timestamps. This collection is enabled by default; except for the account-access and displayed-feed-pages records, you can switch it off at any time in your account settings.

The application does not intentionally add your IP address to the scientific interaction dataset described above. Technical infrastructure may nevertheless process network/security logs.

3. How is your research profile built?

If you provide an ORCID, the service uses it to retrieve publicly available scholarly records associated with that identifier. Publications found through ORCID are shown as “included in research profile”.

The service also searches public scholarly sources using your first and last name. Because name matching can be ambiguous, those papers are shown as “suggested for research profile” rather than being automatically accepted. You can include or exclude suggested papers, remove papers from the included list, and add a paper manually by bibcode. We retain excluded identifiers so that the same incorrect match does not need to be suggested repeatedly.

4. Where do bibliographic records come from?

The service uses public scholarly information and may query ORCID.org, NASA ADS and arXiv.org. These are external services. Depending on the technical implementation, a query can transmit information such as a name or ORCID to the relevant service. We do not send your password or private feedback to those scholarly databases.

5. Why do we use these data?

• To create, verify and secure your account.
• To construct and let you correct your research profile.
• To calculate and display personalised recommendations of new scientific papers.
• To send the optional weekly recommendation email if you enable it.
• To operate, troubleshoot and secure the service.
• If interaction logging is enabled (the default), to evaluate recommendation quality and improve the global recommendation method for users as a whole.

Legal basis. The University of Bern processes personal data in accordance with the data-protection law applicable to it as a public university, and necessary for its statutory academic/research tasks, together with specific user choices where applicable.

6. How recommendations and feedback are used

Recommendations are generated automatically from the publications included in your research profile using the service's general recommendation and ranking methods. The system is designed to help you discover scientific literature; it does not make decisions affecting legal rights, employment, credit, insurance or comparable significant matters.

Interaction logging is enabled by default and can be switched off at any time in your account settings; while it is off, no rating, comment, click or reading-time record is collected. When it is enabled, ratings and other recommendation interactions are used collectively to measure and improve the global recommendation system. For example, they may be used to test whether an improved algorithm tends to rank papers receiving positive feedback higher and papers receiving negative feedback lower. We do not train a separate behavioral model for each individual user from these interactions.

For algorithm-development datasets, direct account identifiers should be removed and replaced by internal/pseudonymous identifiers as soon as the development purpose allows. Results made public or transferred as research/software outputs should not identify individual users.

7. Optional written comments

Written comments are optional. Please use this field only for feedback about the recommendation and do not include confidential information, passwords, health information or other sensitive personal information about yourself or other people.

8. Weekly recommendation email

The weekly email is optional. You can switch it off at any time in your account settings. The email is sent to the address you provide. Delivery necessarily involves the mail systems used to route the message and your chosen institutional or other email provider.

We do not use the weekly-email preference as permission to send unrelated commercial advertising.

9. Hosting and service providers

The primary application hosting and database are operated on Infomaniak/Jelastic infrastructure in Switzerland. Infomaniak acts as a service provider/processor for the University under the applicable contractual arrangements.

The service also communicates with external scholarly services (including ORCID.org, NASA ADS and arXiv.org) and, where you enable weekly email, with the infrastructure needed to deliver email to your address. For these reasons we do not claim that every item of personal data remains exclusively in Switzerland.

10. Do we sell personal data?

No. We do not sell users' personal data as a dataset and we do not disclose users' personal data for third-party advertising.

Interaction data may be used to evaluate and improve the recommendation technology. Research results, software and algorithms arising from this work may later be published, licensed, transferred or commercialized in accordance with University of Bern rules, provided that this does not amount to selling identifiable user data. Any future transfer of an active user database or change of controller would be assessed separately and users would be informed as required by applicable law.

11. How long do we keep data?

We keep personal data only for as long as it is needed for the relevant purpose and in accordance with University retention/archiving requirements.

12. Security

We use technical and organisational measures appropriate to the risks of the service, including encrypted connections, password hashing, access controls, restricted administrative access, backups and security monitoring. No online service can eliminate all risk, and these measures are reviewed when the system changes.

13. Your rights

Depending on the applicable law and circumstances, you may request information about the personal data held about you, correction of inaccurate data, deletion where applicable, and other rights provided by the applicable data-protection law. You can also correct your research profile directly by including or excluding papers.

To exercise your rights or ask a privacy question, contact contact@rxiv-hub.org.

University of Bern Data Protection Office: datenschutz.rechtsdienst@unibe.ch.

The competent cantonal supervisory authority is the data-protection authority of the Canton of Bern. If the EU General Data Protection Regulation applies to a particular processing activity, additional EU rights and supervisory arrangements may also apply.

14. Account deletion

You may request deletion of your account through your personal account section. We will delete related data that are no longer needed, subject to applicable University archiving, security or legal obligations.

15. Changes to this notice

We may update this notice when the service or applicable requirements change. The current version and its date will always be published here. Material changes to the use of personal data will be communicated as required.