Privacy Policy

Our contact details

Name: Clear Skies

E-mail: info@clear-skies.co.uk

Date: 11 July 2022

The type of personal information we collect

We currently collect and process the following information:

  • Submission metadata for research literature, including:
    • author names,
    • Other article metadata such as: article titles, abstracts, submission and decision dates
  • Published metadata for research literature, such as journals and preprints servers, including:
    • author names,
    • Other article metadata such as: article titles, abstracts, submission and decision dates

How we get the personal information and why we have it

Most of the personal information we process is provided to us indirectly from the following sources in the following scenarios:

  • We offer a number of Application Programming Interfaces (APIs). Some of which receive personal data and respond with publicly available publication metadata.
  • Users of the APIs may include personal information in the data that they send to our APIs.
  • We also retrieve published metadata from open sources such as OpenAlex, Crossref, ArXiv, and PubMed.

We use the information that we receive in order to.

  • Confirm whether metadata for a submitted article and metadata for a published article refer to the same article.
  • Our Article Tracker API forwards user queries, including author names, to the Crossref Public API. Crossref’s privacy policy can be found here: https://www.crossref.org/operations-and-sustainability/privacy/
  • We do not, otherwise, share personal data that we receive from our users with anyone.

Under the General Data Protection Regulation (GDPR), the lawful bases we rely on for processing this information are:

  1. We have a contractual obligation.
  2. We have a legitimate interest.

How we store your personal information

  • All data received by Clear Skies APIs is submitted via https, meaning that it is encrypted during the transfer from users to Clear Skies.
  • We do not retain any data received via our APIs.
  • Publication data from open sources is updated regularly and deleted when not in use.

Data relating to customers is maintained as long as the customer is a customer of Clear Skies and will be deleted within 2 years of cessation of a contract.

Your data protection rights

Under data protection law, you have rights including:

Your right of access – You have the right to ask us for copies of your personal information.

Your right to rectification – You have the right to ask us to rectify personal information you think is inaccurate. You also have the right to ask us to complete information you think is incomplete.

Your right to erasure – You have the right to ask us to erase your personal information in certain circumstances.

Your right to restriction of processing – You have the right to ask us to restrict the processing of your personal information in certain circumstances.

Your right to object to processing – You have the the right to object to the processing of your personal information in certain circumstances.

Your right to data portability – You have the right to ask that we transfer the personal information you gave us to another organisation, or to you, in certain circumstances.

You are not required to pay any charge for exercising your rights. If you make a request, we have one month to respond to you.

Please contact us if you wish to make a request.

How to complain

If you have any concerns about our use of your personal information, you can make a complaint to us at info@clear-skies.co.uk.

You can also complain to the ICO if you are unhappy with how we have used your data.

The ICO’s address:           

Information Commissioner’s Office
Wycliffe House
Water Lane
Wilmslow
Cheshire
SK9 5AF

Helpline number: 0303 123 1113
ICO website: https://www.ico.org.uk