Privacy and cookie policy

Sciendor is a publisher of peer-reviewed, open-access scholarly journals. This policy covers the publisher’s website and the websites of all three of its journals, which share one website, one editorial system and one account for each person. It explains how personal data is handled for authors, reviewers, editors and readers.

• Account data — name, email address, affiliation, country and ORCID iD, provided when you register or are invited to a role. One account serves every journal; for editors and reviewers we also record which journals they serve.
• Submission data — the manuscript and supplementary files you upload, manuscript details, co-author details, declarations and all review correspondence, processed solely for peer review and publication in the journal you submitted to.
• Billing data — where an article processing charge applies: billing name, email, institution, address, any tax identifier you supply, the transaction reference and the payment receipt you upload. We never see or store card numbers; payment is made outside this website.
• Reviewer records — for reviewers, a count of reviews invited, completed and declined, and average turnaround time. These are visible only to editors of the journals the reviewer serves and are used to allocate work fairly.
• Correspondence log — a record of the workflow emails we send you (recipient, subject, journal, time and delivery outcome), kept so editors can demonstrate that a notification was sent. Message bodies are not stored, and the log is deleted automatically after 180 days.
• Usage counts — anonymous, aggregate article view and download counters. We do not build individual visitor profiles.

• sc_session (strictly necessary) — a signed, httpOnly session cookie that keeps you signed in across the publisher and journal websites. It contains no tracking identifiers and expires after 7 days.
• sc_journal (strictly necessary, editorial staff only) — remembers which journal an editor last selected in the dashboard. It holds only a journal code and grants no access by itself.
• Cloudflare Turnstile (strictly necessary) — spam protection on sign-in, registration and password-reset forms may set short-lived cookies to verify that you are human.
• sc-cookie-consent (local storage, not a cookie) — remembers that you have read the cookie notice, so it is not shown again.

We do not use advertising cookies, cross-site trackers or third-party analytics profiles.

Account and submission data are processed to perform the publishing agreement with you and to maintain the integrity of the scholarly record. Published articles and their metadata are retained permanently as part of that record — a published article cannot be withdrawn from the literature, though it can be corrected or retracted with a public notice.

Unsuccessful submissions and their review correspondence are retained for five years to support any subsequent integrity enquiry, then deleted. Billing records are kept for as long as tax law requires.

Publication is, by design, an act of disclosure. When an article is published, the following become permanently public: the title, abstract, keywords, full text, figures and tables, and for every author their name, affiliation, country and ORCID iD. Each author also gains a public profile page listing their articles in the journal.

Author email addresses are published only for the corresponding author, and only because readers must be able to contact them about the work. Everything else you give us — declarations, cover letters, reviewer reports, billing details, internal editorial notes — stays private to the editorial team of the journal concerned.

Metadata of published articles (titles, authors, affiliations, abstracts, DOIs) is shared openly with indexing services such as Google Scholar, DOAJ, Crossref and OAI-PMH harvesters — this is the purpose of scholarly publishing. Unpublished manuscripts are visible only to the editorial team of the journal they were submitted to and the reviewers assigned to them. Under double-blind review, reviewers do not see author identities, and authors never see reviewer identities.

We rely on a small number of processors to operate the journals:

• Cloudflare — file storage for manuscripts, figures, supplementary material and article PDFs, and Turnstile spam protection.
• Email delivery — an SMTP mail service that transmits workflow notifications to their recipients. It receives only the recipient’s address and the message itself.
• Hosting — the server infrastructure on which the website and its database run.

We do not sell personal data, and we do not share it for advertising or any purpose unrelated to publishing our journals.

You may request access to, correction of, or deletion of your account data (subject to the requirements of the published record) by contacting [email protected]. Questions about this policy are welcome at the same address.