Privacy Policy

1. Information We Collect

Account information: your email address, and if you sign in with Google or ORCID, your authenticated identity from that provider (name and provider account ID).

Content you submit: manuscripts, abstracts, titles, and other text you provide to our review, writing, and research tools.

Pricing-region signal: a coarse, detected country (and the resulting regional pricing tier) used only to determine which local price and currency to display at checkout.

Usage & device data: basic analytics such as pages visited, feature usage, timestamps, and technical data like IP address and browser user agent, used for security, abuse prevention, and understanding product usage.

2. Why We Collect It (Purpose & Lawful Basis)

We process this information to: provide the Service you request (account access, AI review, research tools); process payments and show you the correct regional price; secure the Service against abuse and fraud; and improve the product based on aggregate usage patterns.

Where applicable data-protection law requires a lawful basis, we rely on contract performance (providing the Service you signed up for), legitimate interests (security, fraud prevention, product improvement), and consent where specifically requested (for example, marketing email).

3. Regional Pricing Data

The country/region signal used to show you regional pricing is used solely to determine which local price and currency to display and to route the correct amount to our payment processor. It is not sold, and it is not used to build an advertising profile.

4. Payment Data

Payments are handled entirely by Dodo Payments, our payment processing partner and Merchant of Record. Dodo Payments collects and stores your payment method details (such as card number) directly — we never see or store your full card number, CVC, or equivalent payment credentials on our servers.

We retain a record of the transaction (amount, date, credit quantity, and a payment reference) for accounting, support, and refund purposes.

5. AI Processing of Submitted Content

Manuscripts and text you submit to review or writing tools are sent to our AI infrastructure, which includes models provided by Anthropic, to generate reviews, scores, and drafted text. This content is used to deliver the feature you requested and, unless you are told otherwise for a specific feature, is not used to train third-party foundation models.

6. Third-Party Processors

We share data with a small number of processors strictly to operate the Service: Anthropic (AI model inference on submitted content), Dodo Payments (payment processing, tax/VAT handling, and Merchant of Record functions), and our infrastructure/hosting providers (servers, storage, email delivery, and security/CDN services).

These processors are contractually restricted to using your data only to provide services to us, not for their own independent purposes.

7. YouTube API Services

Science AI Journal uses YouTube API Services. Specifically, an automated tool we operate uploads educational videos that we produce in-house to our own YouTube channel using the YouTube Data API (the videos.insert endpoint). This is the only way we use YouTube API Services.

By using features of our Service that rely on YouTube API Services, you also agree to be bound by the YouTube Terms of Service. Our use of information received from YouTube API Services adheres to the Google Privacy Policy.

We do not access, collect, store, sell, or share any YouTube user's personal data through the YouTube API. We do not read your YouTube account information, viewing history, subscriptions, or any other YouTube data. The only account our tool is authorized to act on is our own Science AI Journal channel, and the only action it performs is uploading our own original videos.

The authorization credential that lets our tool upload to our own channel is stored securely on our own servers, is used solely for that purpose, and is never shared. You can review or revoke an application's access to any Google Account at any time via the Google security settings page. Because we store no YouTube user data, there is no YouTube user data for us to delete; you can request deletion of the other personal information we hold at any time, as described in the sections on Your Rights and Data Retention above.

8. Cookies

We use essential cookies required for authentication and session management (keeping you signed in, protecting against cross-site request forgery). We do not use third-party advertising cookies.

We set one first-party analytics cookie ("saij_attrib", 30 days) that records, if you later create an account, which channel first brought you to the site — the marketing source in the link you arrived from, the website you came from (its domain name only, never the full address or any search terms), and the first page you landed on (its path only, never query parameters). It contains no personal identifiers and is used solely to understand which channels bring researchers to Science AI Journal.

9. Data Retention

We retain account data and submitted content for as long as your account is active, plus a reasonable period afterward for legal, accounting, and dispute-resolution purposes (for example, transaction records relevant to the Refund Policy). You may request deletion as described below.

10. Your Rights

Depending on your location, you may have the right to access, correct, export, or delete your personal data, and to object to or restrict certain processing. To exercise these rights, email [email protected] from your account's registered email address. We will respond within a reasonable timeframe and may need to verify your identity before acting on the request.

11. Changes to This Policy

We may update this Privacy Policy from time to time to reflect changes in the Service or applicable law. Material changes will be reflected by an updated "Last updated" date on this page.

12. Contact

Questions about this Privacy Policy can be sent to [email protected].