Privacy Policy

This privacy policy (Privacy Policy) sets out the ways in which we, Hindawi Limited (we, us, our), collect and use your personal data (personal information) in connection with our business. It also explains what rights you have to access or change your personal data.

You should also refer to our Terms of Service which govern your use of our Site and serve as a legal contract between us and you.

In this Privacy Policy:

• “Contribution” means any submissions, edits, information or data (in any form) you make available via your Phenom Account including, without limitation, uploading of any articles or edits to articles;
• “Conflict of Interest” means issues outside of the research which could be reasonably be perceived to affect the neutrality or objectivity of the work or its assessment. Please refer to our Publication Ethics page for further information about Conflicts of Interest;
• “Editor” means an editor of one of our journals who reviews submitted articles on the Phenom;
• “Phenom” means the Phenom platform, comprising the following elements: Phenom Review, Phenom Screener, Phenom Production, checks and lists used and/or developed or licensed by us as part of the screening and checking processes and the Content Production System (CPS), including any legacy systems such as the Manuscript Tracking System (“MTS”) and “Phenom Account” means a registered account which enables you to submit, edit, or review any articles intended for publication in one of our journals;
• “Reviewer” means a peer reviewer assigned to reviewer articles that are intended for publication in one of our journals;
• “Site” means our website https://www.hindawi.com/ and its subdomains, including Phenom;
• “Submitting Author” means an author submitting an article intended for publication in one of our journals (note that each author must agree to the Privacy Policy and the Terms of Service individually but where s/he does not do so, then the Submitting Author is deemed to have accepted the Privacy Policy and the Terms of Service on behalf of a group of authors or an institution); and
• “you” and “your” means you, the person visiting the Site, registering for a Phenom Account with us or otherwise using services on the Site.

This Privacy Policy is relevant to you if you are visiting our site, registering for a Phenom Account with us or using the services on the Site. It will also apply if you are an applicant for a job vacancy.

Our Site is not intended for children. We do not knowingly collect or maintain the personal information of children under the age of 13. If you are under the age of 13, please do not access our Site at any time or in any manner. We will take appropriate steps to delete the personal information of persons under the age of 13.

We are a company registered in England under company number 08671628, with our registered address as set out below.

You can contact us either via the “Contact Us” tab on the Site, or as follows:

Information That You Provide

We will collect any information that you provide to us when you:

(a) make an enquiry, provide feedback or make a complaint over the phone, by email or on our Site;

(b) submit correspondence to us by post, email or via our Site;

(c) provide us with your contact details by email or over the phone;

(d) register for a Phenom Account with us or update your profile and other Phenom account details;

(e) submit, edit or review a manuscript via  Phenom depending on whether you are a Submitting Author or Editor or Reviewer;

(f) if you are an institutional administrator and you contact us to make an enquiry;

(g) subscribe to our mailing lists or blog;

(h) attend an event hosted by us;

(i) fill in a form, conduct a search, post content on the website, respond to surveys or use any other features of the website;

(j) engage with an electronic communication from us (email, sms, etc.)

(k) submit a CV;

(l) submit an application to a job vacancy;

(m) attend an interview or assessment; or

(n) “follow”, “like”, post to or interact with our social media accounts, including Facebook, LinkedIn, or Hivebrite (Hindawi’s Editor Community Site).

The information you provide to us will include (depending on the circumstances):

(a) Identity and contact data: names, addresses, email address, phone number, and age;

(b) Phenom Account profile data: if you are registering for a Phenom Account you will also provide a username, password, ORCID ID and additional information about your academic and work history, references and any other such similar information as may be required;

(c) Conflicts of Interest: if you are a Submitting Author, Editor or Reviewer you are obliged to disclose any Conflicts of Interest you may have in relation to the work you are submitting or which you have been assigned to edit or review. Some of the information you disclose may constitute your Special Category  Data (please see below under  Special Category Personal Data for further information about how we process this data);

(d) Financial data: if you are using the Site to pay an Article Processing Charge, or pay for other paid-for services, you will also provide invoice payment details, which may include billing addresses and other contact details;

(e) Employment and background data: if you are submitting a job application, you may also provide additional information about your academic and work history, qualifications, skills, projects and research that you are involved in, references, proof of your entitlement to work in the UK, your national security number, your passport or other identity document details, your current level of remuneration (including benefits), and any other such similar information that you may provide to us; and

(f) Survey data: from time to time we might also ask if you would be willing to participate in our surveys; if you agree, we will also collect any information that you provide as part of that survey.

Information We Collect about You

• Information contained in any correspondence: we will collect any information contained in any correspondence between us. For example, if you contact us using the “Contact Us” tab via the Site or by email or telephone, we will keep a record of that correspondence;
• Information transmitted on the website and Phenom: we will collect information that you upload or post to your Phenom Account and/or any correspondence or interactions that you may have with other Phenom Account holders;
• Transactional data: we will collect information related to your transactions with us whether on the website, by phone or email, including the date and time, the amounts charged and other related transaction details;
• Technical data and website usage: we will also collect certain information about how you use the Site and the device that you use to access the Site. This will include your geographical location, device information (such as your hardware model, mobile network information, unique device identifiers), the data transmitted by your browser (such as your IP address, date and type of the request, content of the request regarding the specific site, time zone settings, access status/HTTP status code, volume of data transmitted, browser type and version, language settings, time zone settings referral source, length of visit to the website, date and time of the request, operating system and interface) number of page views, the search queries you make on the Site and similar information. This information may be collected by a third-party website analytics service provider on our behalf and/or may be collected using cookies. For more information on “Cookies” please refer to the Cookies section below; and
• Research integrity data: our Research Integrity team is responsible for ensuring that all journals published by us comply with ethical standards for scientific research publication (please see our Publication Ethics page for further details). As mentioned above, we ask you to declare any potential Conflict of Interest you may have as a Submitting Author or Editor or Reviewer. In addition, our Research Integrity team will collect relevant information about you which is in the public domain and relates to a potential Conflict of Interest or other publication ethics issues. Some of the information collected by our Research Integrity team may constitute your Special Category  Data (please see below under  Special Category Data for further information about how we process this data);

Information We Collect about You from Third Parties

We also collect data about You from third-parties such as:

• those who operate the platform through which articles are submitted and reviewed;
• article authors, editors and peer reviewers who may recommend you as a potential author, reviewer or editor;
• publicly available sources in order to identify potential contributors, editors and peer reviewers.

Special Category Data

“Special categories” of particularly sensitive personal information (“Special Category Data”) require higher levels of protection. Such Special Category Data includes details about your race or ethnicity, religious or philosophical beliefs, sex life, sexual orientation, political opinions, trade union membership, information about your health and genetic and biometric data. In addition, details about criminal convictions and offences are also subject to higher levels of protection.

We need to have further justification for collecting, storing and using this type of Special Category Data. We have in place an appropriate policy document and safeguards which we are required by law to maintain when processing such data.

As mentioned in the “Information that you provide” and “Research integrity data” sections above, we process Special Category Data in relation to potential or actual Conflicts of Interest for the purpose of our Research Integrity team being able to assess the neutrality or objectivity of a Contribution (for academic purposes). In each case the Special Category Data is information which:

(a) is Special Category Data which you have already manifestly made public; or

(b) is Special Category  Data which you have not already disclosed in the public domain but which you have declared to us at the time you submit your Contribution.

If you are submitting a job application, you may also provide Special Category Data to us about your race or ethnicity, religious beliefs, sexual orientation, health and whether or not you have any disability. We process this Special Category Data relating to your job application where it is needed for reasons of substantial public interest for equal opportunities monitoring, and on the basis of our legal obligations.

Information We Receive from Third Parties

In certain circumstances, we will receive information about you from third parties. For example:

(a) ORCID ID: if you are a Submitting Author using Phenom to submit a Contribution, you will be required to provide your ORCID ID. By providing your ORCID ID you are authorizing that third-party provider to display certain information about you in accordance with your ORCID account settings;

(b) Plagiarism checking services: we also use third-party providers to verify information provided by you via your Phenom Account, including via any articles you submit to us for publication. We use iThenticate and CrossCheck (both based in the USA) software to detect instances of overlapping and similar text in submitted manuscripts. We also use other third-party databases or websites to confirm your publication history to prevent duplicate submission (including Web of Science, Scopus, PubMed, Dimensions and arXiv.org);

(c) Referring organizations: we receive information about you from third parties that are referring you to Hindawi. For example, if you are the co-author or institutional contact of a Submitting Author, the Submitting Author will be required to provide us with information about you. If you are the referring party, you warrant that you have obtained the necessary consent to share this information with us;

(d) Service providers: we may collect personal information from our website developer, IT support provider and payment services provider (who may be based inside or outside the EU) and our bank which processes invoices for  Article Processing Charges or other paid-for services;

(e) Website security: we will collect information from our website security service partners who are based in the UK about any misuse to the website, for instance, the introduction of viruses, Trojans, worms, logic bombs, website attacks or any other material or action that is malicious or harmful;

(f) Employers, recruitment agencies, and referees: if you are a job applicant we may contact your recruiter, current and former employers and/or referees, who may be based inside or outside the EU, to provide information about you and your application;

(g) Please refer to this Privacy Policy to understand what personal data may be collected and used about you and please refer to Hindawi’s cookie policy in order to understand what and why third party cookies are collected and how to manage your cookie preference settings;

(h) Third-party agents: we may receive personal information, such as contact details (e.g. name, address, email address and affiliation), from third-party sales agents who have made a referral to us; and

(i) Third-party sources: we currently use a variety of sources in order to carry out basic research to find potential authors, editors and reviewers and carry out identity and compliance checks. In addition to general information researched on the internet, we make use of information from publicly available, officially registered information providers (such as institutional websites, PubMed, PubMed Central, CrossRef, Dimensions and Outbrain) as well as proprietary sources.

(j) Third-party marketing services providers such as Kudos Innovations Limited, Outsell, Inc., DataSalon Limited and SciencePOD (Armor Media Limited) that help us to refine and target our marketing communications.

We might also receive information about you from third parties if you have indicated to such third party that you would like to hear from us.

We will use your information for the purposes listed below either on the basis of:

• performance of your contract with us and the provision of our services to you;
• your consent (where we request it);
• where we need to comply with a legal or regulatory obligation; or
• our legitimate interests or those of a third party (see “Legitimate Interests” below).

We use your information for the following purposes:

• To provide access to our website: to provide you with access to our Site in a manner convenient and optimal and with personalized content relevant to you including sharing your information with our website hosts and developers (on the basis of our legitimate interest to ensure our Site is presented in an effective and optimal manner);
• To register your Phenom Account: when you sign up to use  Phenom, we will use the details provided on your account registration form (on the basis of performing our contract with you);
• To enable you to communicate with other Phenom users: certain parts of  Phenom enable you to communicate with each other. We will use the information you have provided to enable you to communicate with each other (on the basis of performing our contract with you);
• To enable you to use Phenom: to enable (as applicable) the receipt, review, editing, production and publication of articles in our journals, via  Phenom (on the basis of performing our contract with you);
• Research Integrity: to identity any potential or actual Conflict of Interest which may compromise the neutrality or objectivity of an article or its review (for academic publication purposes or on the basis of your consent where we have requested it);
• Relationship Management: to manage our relationship with you, which will include notifying you about changes to our Terms of Service or Privacy Policy, and asking you to leave a review or take a survey (on the basis of performing our contract with you, to comply with our legal obligations and on the basis of our legitimate interests to keep our records updated and study how our website and services are used);
• Marketing: to keep in contact with you about Hindawi news, Hindawi events, new Phenom features or services, blog posts, new journals or special issues that we believe may interest you, provided that we have the requisite permission to do so and you don’t opt out of receiving such communications (either on the basis of your consent where we have requested it, or our legitimate interests to provide you with marketing communications where we may lawfully do so);
• Suggestions and recommendations: to share your information with selected third parties, to enable them to contact you with information about things that may interest (only where you give us your consent to do so);
• User and customer support: to provide customer service and support (on the basis of our contract with you or on the basis of our legitimate interests to provide you with customer service), deal with enquiries or complaints about the Site and share your information with our website developer, IT support provider, payment services provider and marketing service provider, as necessary to provide customer support (on the basis of our legitimate interest in providing the correct products and services to our users and to comply with our legal obligations);
• Service Research: to carry out aggregated and anonymized research about general engagement with our Site and the products and services it makes available (on the basis of our legitimate interest in providing the right kinds of products and services to our users);
• Fraud and unlawful activity detection: protect, investigate, and deter against fraudulent, unauthorized, or illegal activity, including, without limitation, plagiarism and identity fraud (on the basis of our legitimate interests to operate a safe and lawful business or where we have a legal obligation to do so);
• Compliance with policies, procedures and laws: to comply with our policies, procedures and enforce our legal rights, or to protect the rights, property or safety of our employees and share your information with our technical and legal advisors (on the basis of our legitimate interests to operate a safe and lawful business or where we have a legal obligation to do so).
• To contribute to our membership of open access and open science organisations and further our contribution to open access and open science initiatives such as the OA Switchboard project which involves sharing your data with the OA Switchboard to share with institutions and funders.
• To participate in trials and pilots of third party products and services to improve our Services.

Legitimate Interests

As outlined above, in certain circumstances we may use your personal information to pursue legitimate interests of our own or those of third parties. Where we refer to using your information on the basis of our “legitimate interests”, we mean our legitimate business interests in conducting and managing our business and our relationship with you, including the legitimate interest we have in:

(a) personalizing, enhancing, modifying or otherwise improving the services and/or communications that we provide to you;

(b) providing a high-quality scientific publication meeting standards of academic excellence and research integrity;

(c) detecting and preventing fraud and operating a safe and lawful business;

(d) improving security and optimization of our network, sites and services.

Where we use your information for our legitimate interests, we make sure that we take into account any potential impact that such use may have on you. Our legitimate interests don’t automatically override yours and we won’t use your information if we believe your interests should override ours unless we have other grounds to do so (such as your consent or a legal obligation). If you have any concerns about our processing please refer to the “Your Rights” section below.

In connection with the purposes and on the lawful grounds described above and in addition to the recipients of your information as described above, we will share your personal information when relevant with third parties such as:

• Phenom Account Holders: other Phenom Account holders, where required for the purpose of using your Contribution;
• Our service providers: service providers we work with to deliver our business, who are acting as data processors and provide us with
• Third party collaborators and partners in the fields of open access and open science:

(a) website development and hosting services based in the USA, UK,  Romania and India;

(b) editorial, production, IT, system administration and security (including verification and fraud detection) and quality assurance services based in Romania, India and the Philippines;

(c) production, production editing and typesetting services: TNQ Books & Journals Private Limited (based in India) and SPi Technologies, Inc. (based in the Philippines);

(d) marketing and advertising services (including Outbrain, Facebook Business and Twitter Advertising, Kudos Innovations Limited, DataSalon Limited, Verizon Media and SciencePOD (Armor Media Limited)) and analytics providers (including Outsell, Inc.) based in Europe and the USA;

(e) relationship management, customer services (SPi Technologies, Inc. (based in the Philippines) and tracking for customer service (based in the USA), Freshdesk and Salesforce);

(f) communication services (including Google, Slack and Microsoft), based in the USA;

(g) printing services Lightning Source and Printforce, based in the USA and the Netherlands;

(h) maps services (including Google Maps API), based in the USA;

(i) social media services including Facebook, Twitter, LinkedIn and YouTube, based in the USA;

(j) payment services, Braintree (based in USA) and Paypal (based in Luxembourg);

(k) editorial and quality assurance services and production services: Scientific Publishing Services (P) Ltd. (based in India);

(l) plagiarism checking services, iThenticate and CrossRef Similarity Check (Crossref), based in the USA;

(m) banking services, HSBC based in the UK;

(n) legal, accountancy, auditing and insurance services and other professional advisers based in the UK;

(o) recruitment service providers based in the UK;

(p) Reviewer Connect Services (Publons UK Limited and WeChat).

• Other publishers: we may also share information with other publishers for the purposes of academic misconduct investigations. These other publishers may be located outside of the EU;
• Marketing parties: any selected third party that you consent to our sharing your information with for marketing purposes;
• Prospective sellers and buyers of our business: any prospective seller or buyer of such business or assets, only in the event that we decide to sell or buy any business or assets; and
• Other third parties (including professional advisers): any other third parties (including regulatory authorities, courts and government agencies) where necessary to enable us to enforce our legal rights, or to protect the rights, property or safety of our employees or where such disclosure may be permitted or required by law.

(q) to contribute to our membership of open access and open science organisations and further our contribution to open access and open science initiatives such as the OA Switchboard project which involves sharing your data with the OA Switchboard to share with institutions and funders.

(r) to participate in trials and pilots of third party products and services to improve our Services.

We require third parties to maintain appropriate security to protect your information from unauthorised access or processing.

Please refer to our Cookie Policy. 

We operate a policy of “privacy by design” by looking for opportunities to minimise the amount of personal information we hold about you. We use appropriate technological and operational security measures to protect your information against any unauthorized access or unlawful use, such as:

• ensuring the physical security of our offices or other sites;
• ensuring the physical and digital security of our equipment and devices by using appropriate password protection and encryption;
• maintaining a data protection policy for, and delivering data protection training to, our employees; and
• limiting access to your personal information to those in our company who need to use it in the course of their work.

We will retain your information for as long as is necessary to provide you with the services that you have requested from us or long as we reasonably require to retain the information for our lawful business purposes, such as for the purposes of exercising our legal rights or where we are permitted to do. We operate a data retention policy and look to find ways to reduce the amount of information we hold about you and the length of time that we need to keep it. For example,

• we archive our email and paper correspondence regularly and destroy information no longer required for our legitimate purposes;
• we retain information relating to job applicants for a period of 6 months from an application decision;
• we retain certain information relating to your Phenom Account (including Conflicts of Interest information) indefinitely for Research Integrity purposes and use appropriate safeguards to ensure the security of such information; and
• we maintain a suppression list of email addresses of individuals who no longer wish to be contacted by us. So that we can comply with their wishes we must store this information permanently.

You can also play a part in keeping your information safe by:

• choosing a strong account password and changing it regularly;
• using different passwords for different online accounts;
• keeping your login and password confidential and avoiding sharing these details with others;
• making sure you log out of the Site each time you have finished using it. This is particularly important when using a shared computer;
• letting us know if you know or suspect that your account has been compromised, or if someone has accessed your account without your permission;
• keeping your devices protected by using the latest version of your operating system and maintaining any necessary anti-virus software; and
• being vigilant to any fraudulent emails that may appear to be from us. Any emails that we send will come from an email address ending in ‘hindawi.com’, including subdomains of ‘hindawi.com’, e.g. ‘@hindawi.com’ or ‘@journals.hindawi.com’.

Our company is located in the UK.

Many of our external third parties we engage to assist us in providing our Site and services to you, such as by providing hosting and IT services and journal production servers are based outside the EEA so their processing of your personal data will involve a transfer of data outside the EEA.

Whenever we transfer your personal data out of the EEA, we ensure a similar degree of protection is afforded to it by ensuring at least one of the following transfer solutions are implemented:

(a) we will only transfer your personal data to countries that have been deemed to provide an adequate level of protection for personal data by the European Commission. For further details, see European Commission: Adequacy of the protection of personal data in non-EU countries;

(b) where we use certain service providers, we may use specific contracts approved by the European Commission which give personal data the same protection it has in Europe. For further details, European Commission: Model contracts for the transfer of personal data to third countries; and(c) where we use providers based in the US, we may transfer data to them if they are part of the Privacy Shield which requires them to provide similar protection to personal data shared between the Europe and the US. For further details, see European Commission: EU-US Privacy Shield.

A list of the countries outside of the EEA to which we may transfer your personal information is available here:

• Philippines;
• USA; and
• India.

Please contact us using the contact details at the top of this Privacy Policy if you want further information on the specific mechanism used by us when transferring your personal data out of the EEA.

You have certain rights in respect of the information that we hold about you, including:

• the right to be informed of the ways in which we use your information, as we seek to do in this Privacy Policy;
• the right to ask us not to process your personal data for marketing purposes;
• the right to request access to the information that we hold about you;
• the right to request that we correct or rectify any information that we hold about you which is out of date or incorrect;
• in certain circumstances, the right to ask us to stop processing information about you; and
• the right to lodge a complaint about us to the UK Information Commissioner’s Office (https://ico.org.uk/);
• in addition to your right to lodge a complaint about us to the UK Information Commissioner’s Office (https://ico.org.uk/), you will also be able to lodge a complaint with the relevant authority in your country of work or residence;
• the right to withdraw your consent for our use of your information in reliance of your consent (refer to the “How We Use Information about You” section to see when we are relying on your consent), which you can do by contacting us using any of the details at the top of this Privacy Notice;
• the right to object to our using your information on the basis of our legitimate interests or those of a third party (refer to the “How We Use Information about You” section to see when we are relying on our legitimate interests) if there is something about your particular situation which makes you want to object to processing on this ground;
• the right to receive a copy of any information we hold about you (or request that we transfer this to another service provider) in a structured, commonly-used, machine readable format, in certain circumstances; and
• the right to ask us to limit or cease processing or erase information we hold about you in certain circumstances.

Please note that we may need to retain certain information for our own record-keeping and research purposes. We may also need to send you service-related communications relating to your Phenom Account even when you have requested not to receive marketing communications.

How to exercise your rights

• You may exercise your rights above by contacting us using the details in the “About Us” section of this Privacy Policy, or in the case of preventing processing for marketing activities also by checking certain boxes on forms that we use to collect your data to tell us that you don’t want to be involved in marketing.

What we need from you to process your requests

• We may need to request specific information from you to help us confirm your identity and to enable you to access your personal data (or to exercise any of your other rights). This is a security measure to ensure that personal data is not disclosed to any person who has no right to receive it. We may also contact you to ask you for further information in relation to your request to speed up our response;
• You will not have to pay a fee to access your personal data (or to exercise any of the other rights). However, we may charge a reasonable fee if your request is clearly unfounded, repetitive or excessive. Alternatively, we may refuse to comply with your request in these circumstances. We will try to respond to all legitimate requests within one month. Occasionally it may take us longer than a month if your request is particularly complex or you have made a number of requests. In this case, we will notify you and keep you updated.

You might end up providing personal information directly to third parties as a consequence of your interactions with our Site and other services offered by us. For example, you may attend an event hosted by us where you communicate personal information directly with other attendees. We are not responsible for how such third parties use personal data provided by you.

Please be responsible with personal information of others when using our Site and the services available on it. We are not responsible for your misuse of personal information, or for the direct relationship between you and others when takes place outside of the Site or our services.

The Site may include links to third-party websites, plug-ins and applications. Clicking on those links or enabling those connections may allow third parties to collect or share data about you. We do not control these third-party websites and are not responsible for their privacy statements. When you leave our Site, we encourage you to read the privacy notice of every website you visit.  Please refer to Hindawi’s cookie policy for more information on what and why third party cookies are collected and how to manage your cookie preference settings.

We may make changes to this Privacy Policy from time to time. We will post any changes to our site, or notify you of any material changes by e-mail. Any changes will come into effect the next time you engage with us after the changes have been notified.

It is important that the personal data we hold about you is accurate and current. Please keep us informed if your personal data changes during your relationship with us by updating your profile account information or contacting us via the contact details at the top of this Privacy Notice.