Personal information

While interacting with the UDS Sites, we may request personal information from you, which may include items such as your name, mailing address, email address, company name, institutional affiliation, telephone number, credit card or other payment information, and ORCID iD. Your provision of such information is strictly voluntary. You can generally visit the UDS Sites without disclosing such information. If you register on a UDS website, we will gather and store your user name and password.

If you are an author who is submitting or has submitted a manuscript or other research outputs to UDS for our consideration or for posting on our sites or as a preprint, we will require you to provide the above types of information so that we may consider, process, and possibly publish your paper, in conformance with accepted publishing standards. Where your paper is published or posted as a preprint, at least your name, affiliation, and ORCID iD will appear as part of the paper. Likewise, when you register on a UDS site for updates or to receive other types of notifications from us, we will ask for your email address at a minimum to enable us to send you the information you have requested.

Technical information

Additionally, by means of your interactions with the UDS Sites, we may collect, have access to, store and use your computer’s IP address, the URL/domain name of any referring website, the time and date of your visit to the UDS Sites, and certain information known as “clickstream data” to enable us to understand how people interact with the UDS Sites, to analyze data for trends and statistics, to help diagnose and solve issues with the UDS Sites and our technologies, products, and services, and to optimize the performance of the UDS Sites. We also use session cookies, small data files stored in your browser so you don’t have to log in each time you visit any of our web pages. From time to time, we use software tools to play back user sessions for purposes of assessing our customers’ interactions with our software, and these sessions may be linked to your user account. If you do not want session cookies stored on your computer, you may be able to adjust your browser settings to prevent this, but note that by not accepting cookies, some pages may not fully function and you may not be able to access certain information on the UDS Sites.

How we may use and disclose your information

UDS uses your personal information to customize your experience on the UDS sites and to facilitate our interactions with you. If you are an author, we will use your personal information for the purpose of processing, reviewing, communicating about, facilitating editorial review and peer review, for publishing, and to facilitate payment of article processing charges. If you are an editor or reviewer, we may use your personal information to contact you about your potential or actual role as an editor or reviewer, to request and facilitate your review and handling of manuscripts, and to update you on news and developments at UDS as it may affect your work with us. If you simply come to UDS websites to read content, we will use information such as your URL and cookies to provide a good experience, as described above.

Except as where necessary to provide services to you, UDS staff do not typically take note of your personal information; the information is mainly stored on or by our computers, computer networks, servers, tools, and systems, as described above.

If you submit a manuscript to us for possible publishing, we will send the title and abstract of your paper, and your name, to one or more potential editors and reviewers, to gauge their interest in reviewing your paper. If they agree to handle your paper, we will send them your full manuscript and any revisions and relevant comments you have provided relating thereto.

We may disclose personal information as discussed above and as reasonably necessary for the purposes described in this privacy policy to our employees and to third parties under contract with us, including vendors, volunteers, independent contractors, and consultants, to financial institutions for the purposes of facilitating payment of fees owed, web and technical support providers, other publishers and/or content hosting providers under contract with us, third parties authorized by you to receive such information, and as may be required or permitted by law. As described above, we may also share information regarding you and your manuscript or other research content as reasonably necessary with parties such as external editors and reviewers, and with community journal staff, curators, and channel managers.

If you choose to have your manuscript published as a preprint, we will send your manuscript to our preprint partner(s) for posting of your paper.

If an author chooses to publish their peer review history, then emails and other communications between reviewers, editors and authors via a UDS Site will be made public. If you are a reviewer and provide us with your consent, we will disclose your name as part of the peer review history when an article is published and the author has chosen to publish the peer review history. To remove your name from the peer review history after disclosure to the public, you can email editorial@udspub.com

We share only the information necessary for third parties to provide the intended products and services. In some cases, the applications or user interfaces you encounter while on our sites are managed by third parties, who may require that you provide your personal information and who have assured us of their compliance with applicable laws.

3. No sale or leasing of your information

Except as described in this privacy policy, we will not disclose your personal information to third parties without your consent. We will not sell or lease your personal information to any third party. We may disclose aggregate demographic and statistical information with our business partners; this information is not specific to the identification of you as an individual.

How long we retain your information

We keep your personal information for as long as is necessary to provide services to you, and for as long as your account and/or registration with UDS is active. We will retain and use your information as necessary to comply with our legal obligations, to resolve disputes, and to enforce our agreements.

Additional reasons why we may gather, use, disclose and store personal information

In addition to the reasons stated above, we may use your personal information to comply with contracts, legal agreements, our terms of use and privacy policies, and to comply with applicable laws. We may produce personal information as and to the extent compelled by court order or a law enforcement agency.

Protection of personal information

We endeavor to protect the personal information we receive, gather and store, by such means as password protection, firewalls, encryption, and other means.

Third party websites

If you are linked, directed to or click on a third party website in your interactions with the UDS Sites,  we cannot control what information you may provide to that party or on/at that website. As such, we urge that you exercise caution before providing them with your personal information.

Consent to receive email communications

Except in countries or jurisdictions where it is not be permitted by law, we may from time to time send you email communications regarding our business, products or services in response to your use of the UDS Sites, and by providing your email address, you consent to receive such communications. Where required by law, we will request that you opt-in (consent) to receive such communications from us before sending you such information.

You may opt out of receiving such communications by contacting us at editorial@udspub.com or by using the unsubscribe link(s) in emails we send you.

How to contact us regarding your personal information

If you wish to discuss what personal information we may have pertaining to you, or the handling or potential disclosure of the same, or you wish to withdraw consent regarding these matters or to ask us to delete your personal information, you may contact us at editorial@udspub.com