Privacy Policy

This policy was last updated on 05/06/2023.

This is Springer Nature's privacy policy (hereafter referred to as “policy”) for the submission to publication workflow system.

Certain personal data as described in this policy is gathered through the use of the submission to publication workflow system and controlled by the Springer Nature Group (https://group.springernature.com/gp/group) publishing legal entity of the journal (hereafter referred to as “Publisher” or “we”) to which you submit.

The details of the respective Publisher, acting as the data controller, can be discerned at the website for the journal at which you are submitting, reviewing or editing.

We will only use the personal data gathered during the submission to publication workflow systems as set out in this policy. Below you will find information on how we use your personal data, for which purposes your personal data is used, with whom it is shared, and what control and information rights you may have.

I. Summary of our processing activities

We publish scholarly journals, books, news and data. Some of this material is openly available, some of it is only available to subscribers. The following summary offers a brief overview of the data processing activities that are undertaken on the submission to publication systems. You will find more detailed information under the indicated sections below.

In case of registration for one our services, personal data will be processed in the scope of such services (see III).

  • Your personal data will be used for statistical analysis that helps us to improve our services (see III).
  • We will use your personal data and contact details to tell you about other publishing opportunities in your interest. You can opt out of these communications at any time (see III)
  • Some of your personal data may be processed in the course of implementing a peer review procedure (see III).
  • Your personal data may be disclosed to third parties (see V) that might be located outside your country of residence; potentially, different data protection standards may apply (see VI).
  • We have implemented appropriate safeguards to secure your personal data (see VII) and retain your personal data only as long as necessary (see VIII).
  • Under the legislation applicable to you, you may be entitled to exercise certain rights with regard to the processing of your personal data (see IX).

II. Definitions

  • Personal data: means any information relating to a natural person who can be identified, directly or indirectly, in particular by reference to an identifier such as a name, an identification number, location data, or an online identifier.
  • Processing: means any operation that is performed on personal data, such as collection, recording, organisation, structuring, cataloguing, storage, adaptation or any kind of disclosure or other use.

III. Information we collect and how we use it

Our submission to publication workflow systems include the following services: peer review; content preparation and proofing; publication; and distribution of published material. In order to use the aforementioned services you have to set up an initial account. Where optional paid services may be engaged, you will be prompted to set up an additional, or enhance an existing account.

With regard to the registration of an account and its subsequent use, we process the following information:

  • Information that is provided during registration such as your name, user name, ORCID ID (if applicable) and email;
  • Information in connection with an account sign-in facility, e.g. login and password details;
  • Communications sent by you, e.g. via email or website communication forms
  • Content files and covering letters provided by you;
  • Grants, funding, membership, institution, society, committee registration
  • Billing or invoicing information;
  • Information received from societies we work with, e.g. address, name, email;
  • Your publication record based on publicly available data.

The information that is necessary for the performance of the service is labelled accordingly.

We will process the personal data you provide in order to:

  • Identify you at sign-in;
  • Administer your account;
  • Provide you with the services and information offered through the submission to publication workflow systems or that which you additionally request;
  • Communicate with you;
  • Provide information to you as an Author about other publishing opportunities, with the Springer Nature group, you can stop these communications at any time by clicking the link in each email or contacting customer services;
  • Communicate with you in your capacity as a current or potential Peer Reviewer, Editorial Board Member, or external Editor to provide information about the journal (s) and content you have worked on; you can stop these communications to you as a Peer Reviewer, Editorial Board Member, or external Editor at any time by clicking the link in each email or contacting customer services. Stopping these communications will not affect your status as Peer Reviewer, Editorial Board Member or external Editor with respect to the journal.
  • Process payments;
  • To ensure the accuracy of content attribution and the quality and integrity of the peer review process;
  • Provide you with optional e-TOC alerts and/or citation alerts;
  • Transfer your submission to an alternative Springer Nature title if applicable;
  • Offer assistance to deposit your data (if applicable);
  • Create a profile of your publication record based on publicly available data, such as published
    • books and articles, citations and grants awarded. This information will not be used to determine article acceptance, nor will it be used for automated decision making. This information will be used to personalise communications and provide you with latest news about our products and services;
  • Authorise and process Article Publication Charges (APCs);
  • Any additional orders such as article offprints;
  • Communicate with you in your capacity as a current or past user of the system to invite you for research designed to improve our services, you can stop these communications to you at any time by clicking the link in each email or contacting customer services. Stopping these communications will not affect your status with respect to the journal.
  • As an author we’ll highlight publishing opportunities in the form of recommendations via our Researcher Home website. We’ll use your publishing history to do this. You can opt out of these recommendations at any time by emailing personalisation@springernature.com.

For this, the legal basis is Article 6 sec. 1 sent. 1 lit. b GDPR, and for our legitimate interest in providing you assistance, optimising our services and preventing fraud, also provide info about products and services of interest to you Article 6 sec. 1 sent. 1 lit. f GDPR.

Your personal account registration data is, in the absence of exceptions within the specific services mentioned, retained for as long as your account is used. Content and communications, associated with submissions, reviews or decisions made by an account holder, will be kept on file. Content may be engaged in relation to the services provided and in the interests of the integrity of published material. Such a decision will be made under the oversight of the Springer Nature Research Integrity Group. The need for legal actions within the services or payment problems can lead to a longer retention of your personal data.

In order to ensure the high quality of our journals and publications, as well as the significance of the scientific research published, we have implemented a peer review procedure.

In order to find and contact suitable and qualified peer reviewers to review within the relevant research community, editors and administrators may create a profile using your publication record based on publicly available data and some of your basic personal data (i.e. email address, name and research interest) to register you for our Peer Review System. The legal basis for processing your personal data is the Publisher’s or the respective editor’s legitimate interest in finding and contacting suitable and qualified peer reviewers to ensure the high level of papers and articles published in our journals, Art. 6 (1) sent. 1 lit. f GDPR.

If you do not wish to be contacted any longer, you can contact us by sending an email to the email address provided in the footer of any message sent. Alternatively, you may contact customerservice@springernature.com . Please note that we may keep some of your personal data in order to register your explicit wish to not be contacted in the future, and thus to prevent any future processing of your data in this regard. The legal basis for this is the Publisher and your legitimate interest in recalling your wish and preventing any future contacting, Article 6 (1) sent. 1 lit. f GDPR.

IV. Third party content Links to third party websites

This submission and peer review system may contain links to third party websites, including journal affiliates and scholarly societies. We are not responsible for the content and the data collection on respective third party websites; please check the privacy policy of respective websites for information of respective websites’ data processing activities.

V. Information sharing

Where personal data is disclosed to third parties for the purposes mentioned above the legal basis for the transfer of your personal data is Article 6 sec. 1 sent. 1 lit. b and f GDPR. Some of the recipients may reside outside the EEA. Data is only shared to the extent that it is needed to perform the service of peer review, and peer review is to be conducted within the security of the workflows which control these access permissions.

In the course of providing our peer review services, your data may be accessed by different members of the editorial team such as editors and assistants to the editorial office. To determine the locations of the editorial board members, you may refer to a journal’s homepage. Granting access to your personal data and the respective processing activity will be based on our interest, and the legitimate interest of the respective society publishing the journal, in successfully publishing high quality articles and papers, and ensuring the quality and significance of the respective research published in our journals, products and databases, Article 6 sec. 1 sent. 1 lit. f GDPR.

In order to do so we and/or the respective society may process your personal data to find, contact, and evaluate suitable and qualified peer reviewers within the relevant research community. This also includes data sharing between us and the respective society. For example, we may share reviewer and author data to publish the journal.

Please note that the publisher and the society are independently responsible for the respective data processing conducted. We can neither limit the extent to which personal data is processed by the respective society nor do we regulate the processing’s purpose or the period your personal data will be retained. It is also possible that the above-mentioned societies may disclose your personal data to their business partners, third parties or authorities. For further information on the data processing under the society’s control please refer to the respective society’s privacy notice.

We provide TOC (table of content) alerts to members as part of the services they are entitled to under their membership with the society. This is a core element of the overall service and to this end your personal (i.e. name and email address) data is transferred to Springer Nature by the society. The legal basis for processing is Art. 6 (1) 1 lit. b GDPR. Individual members may opt-out of TOC alerts at any time by contacting customerservice@springernature.com or using the unsubscribe link in every email. This applies equally to Book Series Partners, in the event that book volume alerts are sent to a Series Partner’s registered recipients.

Your personal data will be transferred to and processed inside and outside of the EEA. For further information on cross border data transfer, please refer to section VI.

With respect to Article Publication Charges (APCs); if you are an author we’ll share your personal data with third parties, like your institution or employer. This is required to manage and approve payment of associated APCs in order to fulfill the publication of your manuscript, where applicable. By submitting your article for consideration, you acknowledge that if you are recognised as affiliated to an institution or funder with a Springer Nature open access agreement, your name and contact details may be shared with a representative from that institution or funder in order for us to verify whether they agree to cover, in full or in part, the article processing charge (APC) that is payable upon editorial acceptance of submitted articles. For this, the legal basis is Article 6 sec. 1 sent. 1 lit. b GDPR, to fulfil our contractual obligations to you.

Should you choose not to follow the open access route to publication we may still share your personal data with the institution or funder you’re affiliated with. Importantly we will only do this post publication to ensure there’s no bearing on the evaluation of your submission prior to acceptance. The legal basis to share your data in this instance is Article 6 sec. 1 sent. 1 lit. f GDPR, our legitimate interest to develop and improve our open access program to the benefit of authors and the scientific community generally.

Customer service, administrative, operational and systems support is provided by other entities of the Springer Nature Group and third party contractors (together “Contractors”). We may disclose your personal data to Contractors who assist us in providing the services we offer through the submission and peer review system. Such a transfer will be based on data processing agreements in accordance with Article 28 of the GDPR. Therefore, our Contractors will only use your personal data to the extent

necessary to perform their functions and will be contractually bound to process your personal data only on our behalf and in compliance with our requests. Further services, provided by third party technology and service providers, are similarly bound by data processing agreements.

We may disclose anonymous aggregate statistics about users of the submission to publication workflow systems in order to describe our services to prospective partners, advertisers and other reputable third parties and for other lawful purposes, but these statistics will not include any personal data. We may provide aggregated data for inclusion in publishing metrics.

In the event that we undergo re-organisation or are sold to a third party, any personal data we hold about you may be transferred to that re-organised entity or third party in compliance with applicable law. We may disclose your personal data if legally entitled or required to do so (for example if required by law or by a court order). The legal basis for this will be Article 6 sec. 1 sent. 1 lit. c GDPR (in conjunction with the respective national law).

Research Square

We work closely with Research Square (of which Springer Nature is an investor) to provide Springer Nature authors with optional services to improve their manuscript and provide greater transparency into the peer review process.

Research Square (Research Square R&D LLC, 601 W. Main St. Suite 102, Durham, NC, USA) provides software and services to the research community to help them communicate, publish and promote their research.

Where enabled on the journal Springer Nature authors are provided with access to a private author dashboard upon submission to the journal which provides granular insight into the status of their manuscript as it progresses through the peer-review process, and a place where authors can improve their manuscript via free and paid for services offered by Research Square, should they wish.

Where offered during submission, authors will be able to opt in to the In Review service which posts their manuscript as a permanent, public, preprint on the Research Square platform. The preprint will be published under a CC-BY license.

To be able to offer both services, Springer Nature will send Research Square R&D LLC data on the author’s manuscript and status updates as it progresses through the peer-review process. The data transferred includes: manuscript metadata (title, authors (names, email addresses, corresponding author details) subject areas, keywords, funding information); manuscript, figure, table and supplementary information files (but not cover letters and any other files explicitly indicated to be for use of editorial staff only) of initial submissions only for hybrid and subscription titles, and all versions for Open Access titles; notification and date of key stages in the peer-review process. These stages include but are not limited to: passing of initial checks, manuscript assignment to an editor, peer reviewers invited, peer reviewers agreed, peer review reports returned, editorial decision. For journals that operate an open or transparent peer review model for all submitted manuscripts, the reviewer reports (but not reviewer identities) are also passed to Research Square. For these titles only the reviewer reports are posted in the private author dashboard and never publicly.

Research Square uses this data to populate the peer review timeline in the private author dashboard, and surface free and paid for services that are appropriate to the author depending on where their manuscript is within the peer-review process. If authors have opted in for the In Review service during submission this data will be used to post the manuscript as a public preprint and populate the public peer review timeline (if offered).

For the Private Author Dashboard your data is shared based on Article 6 sec. 1 sent. 1 lit. f GDPR and represents our legitimate interest to increase transparency of the peer review process and support authors in improving their manuscript. For In Review your data is shared based on Article 6 sec. 1 sent. 1 lit. a GDPR, your explicit consent to this optional service.

Research Square acts as a data processor on our behalf, please see their Privacy Policy and Terms of Service for further information as to how Research Square will process your data.

SpeedCurve

We use SpeedCurve, a performance monitoring tool to identify, analyse and help fix website performance issues. SpeedCurve will process your personal data on our behalf, including your IP address. We have a data processing agreement in place to support this arrangement. The legal basis for this processing is Art. 6 sec. 1 sent. 1 lit. a GDPR and reflects your consent to non-essential performance measuring cookies. You can update or withdraw your consent by clicking Manage cookies/Do not sell my data in the page footer.

Hotjar

Hotjar is a behaviour and analytics software provided by HotJar LTD, Dragonara Business Centre, 5th Floor, Dragonara Road, Paceville St Julian's STJ 3141 Malta.

We use Hotjar in order to better understand our users’ needs and to optimize our service and experience. Hotjar is a technology service that helps us better understand our users’ experience (e.g. how much time they spend on which pages, which links they choose to click, what users do and don’t like, etc.) and this enables us to build and maintain our service with user feedback. Hotjar uses cookies and other technologies to collect data on our users’ behavior and their devices and may include recording of sample behaviours. This includes a device's IP address (processed during your session and stored in a de-identified form), device screen size, device type (unique device identifiers), browser information, geographic location (country only), and the preferred language used to display our website. Hotjar stores this information on our behalf in a pseudonymized user profile. Hotjar is contractually forbidden to sell any of the data collected on our behalf. The legal basis for this processing is Art. 6 sec. 1 sent. 1 lit. a GDPR and reflects your consent to non-essential cookies.

Umbrella for Diversity, Inclusion and Equity (DEI) Analysis

Springer Nature is deeply committed to fostering a scientific community that supports and benefits from the talents of researchers from a wide range of backgrounds. In support of the advancement of diversity, inclusion and equity (DEI) in research we may ask you to provide information related to gender and ethnicity, for example. This personal information will in no way be used when evaluating and handling your current or future submissions to Springer Nature; this data will be aggregated and anonymised before being analysed and reported in order to improve our policies and processes. More details on the Springer Nature DEI program. By agreeing with the policy you give consent to the use of your personal data (under Article 6 of the General Data Protection Regulation(GDPR)). You can remove your consent at any time in the future by contacting us.

We work with a company called Umbrella Analytics that provides expertise in the field of DEI data analysis. Umbrella Analytics acts as a data processor on our behalf and we have a data processing agreement in place to support this relationship. For more information on how Umbrella Analytics uses personal data please see their privacy policy.

Web of Science researcher profile

We are working with Web of Science researcher profile to give our peer reviewers official and verified recognition for their contribution in ensuring that research is reliable and relevant before it is communicated publicly. Web of Science researcher profile (Clarivate Analytics, 1500 Spring Garden St 4th floor, Philadelphia, PA 19130) is a free service for academics to track, verify and showcase their peer review and editorial contributions. We offer to send automated verification to Clarivate Analytics – the provider of Web of Science researcher profile – that reviewers have completed their review upon manuscript acceptance. In order to do so we require reviewers’ permission to transmit the following data to Web of Science: name, email address, title of the reviewed manuscript, name of journal, and date of the review submission. Web of Science uses review data to generate derivative metadata for the benefit of Web of Science and the reviewer (without revealing what has been reviewed). For example, Web of Science may publicly verify the record as a reviewer, or may help editors to identify candidate reviewers. Please find details of processing in Web of Science’s privacy policy. Reviewers will be offered an opportunity to opt-into this service during review submission.

Freshworks

We use third party service providers, like Freshworks Inc ("Freshworks") to enable interaction with you on our website and/or our product. As a data processor acting on our behalf, Freshworks automatically receives and records certain information of yours like device model, IP address, the type of browser being used and usage pattern through cookies and browser settings. Freshworks performs analytics on such data on our behalf which helps us improve our service to you. Our use of your personal data for this service is with your consent, provided via our cookie preference centre, Article 6 sec. 1 sent. 1 lit. a GDPR.

You can opt-out of this service at any time by visiting our cookie preference centre by clicking on the “Manage cookies/Do not sell my data” link in the page footer.

Slimmer AI

We work with Slimmer AI to support our publishing processes to ensure we offer authors the support tools for submission, or by processing that submission and its content. Slimmer AI tools support editors in making faster decisions, supporting swift assignment and reviewer discovery. Your personal data is shared based on Article 6 sec. 1 sent. 1 lit. f GDPR and represents our legitimate interest to support authors in improving their manuscript, assist in the submission process, and to augment the editorial process. Slimmer AI acts as a data processor in this regard and we have a data processing agreement in place to support this relationship. You can find out more about how slimmer process personal data more widely by clicking here.

Slimmer AI is also at the heart of our Reviewer Finder application. Data is sourced from Web of Science (By Clarivate), PubMed, ORCID, DOAJ, CrossRef and Springer Nature's own publishing data and supplied via Slimmer’s Author Data Graph (ADG). As a potential reviewer, your personal data may be processed by Springer Nature, (i.e. Email address, name and research interest). You have the right to object to this processing at any time by contacting customerservice@springernature.com. The legal basis for processing your personal data is our and the Publisher’s or the respective editor’s legitimate interest in finding and contacting suitable and qualified peer reviewers to ensure the high level of papers and articles published in our journals, Art. 6 (1) sent. 1 lit. f GDPR.

Article Approval Service (AAS)

The Article Approval Service (AAS) is a service for employees of external institutions (consortia, universities, research institutions, societies). It is used to verify if authors are affiliated with these institutions. If this relation can be verified the institutions fund the Article Processing Charge (APC) needed for publishing the article with Open Access. The AAS does not share personal user data with any 3rd parties as a direct result of this service. For this the legal basis is Article 6 sec. 1 sent. 1 lit. b GDPR, to fulfil our contractual obligations to you in enabling APC charges for open access articles.

Amplitude

Amplitude provides analytics and event-tracking software. We use Amplitude to better understand user behaviour (e.g. which pages they visit, and which links they click). This helps us to optimise online service and user experience. Amplitude uses cookies to collect data on user behaviour. This includes browsing activity, history, location, operating system, language, device information, and IP addresses amongst others. Amplitude acts as a data processor on our behalf and we have a data processing agreement in place to support this. The legal basis for this processing is Art. 6 sec. 1 sent. 1 lit. a GDPR and reflects user consent to non-essential cookies. User consent can be removed by rejecting non-essential cookies in the privacy preference centre.

Review Commons

Review Commons is a platform for journal-independent peer review in the life sciences. It aims to provide a transparent and collaborative peer review process for preprints. Review Commons is a joint initiative of EMBO (Meyerhofstrasse 1, 69117 Heidelberg, Germany) and ASAPbio (600-16th St Ste N312E, MC2200, San Francisco, CA 94143-2517, USA). Where enabled on Springer Nature journals that are Review Commons affiliated journals, and at an author’s request, referee reports and their identities will be transferred from Review Commons to the journal. The journal will use your data, including your name, email address, article title and editorial decision, to inform Review Commons of the receipt of the manuscript and to inform Review Commons of the manuscript outcome at the Springer Nature journal. Springer Nature will use your data to inform Review Commons of the final decision on a manuscript. For this our legal basis is Article 6 sec. 1 sent. 1 lit. b GDPR, performance of a contract. Review Commons and Springer Nature act as independent data controllers in this activity.

VI. Cross border data transfers

Within the scope of our information sharing activities set out above, your personal data may be transferred to other countries (including countries outside the European Economic Area [EEA]) which may have different data protection standards from your country of residence. Please note that data processed in a foreign country may be subject to foreign laws and accessible to foreign governments, courts, law enforcement, and regulatory agencies. However, we will endeavour to take reasonable measures to maintain an adequate level of data protection when sharing your personal data with such countries.

In the case of a transfer outside of the EEA, this transfer is safeguarded by EU Model Clauses in accordance with Article 46 GDPR. You can find further general information about the aforementioned safeguards by following this link https://ec.europa.eu/info/law/law-topic/data-protection_en or contact our Group Data Protection Officer via customerservice@springernature.com for specific information on respective safeguards.

VII. Security

We have industry-standard security measures in place to protect against the loss, misuse and alteration of personal data under our control. For example, our security and privacy policies are periodically reviewed and amended as necessary and only authorised personnel have access to personal data. Whilst we cannot ensure or guarantee that loss, misuse or alteration of information will never occur, we use all reasonable efforts to prevent it.

You should bear in mind that submission of information over the internet is never entirely secure. We cannot guarantee the security of information you submit via our website whilst it is in transit over the internet, and any such submission is at your own risk.

VIII. Data retention

We strive to keep our processing activities with respect to your personal data as limited as possible. In the absence of specific retention periods set out in this policy, your personal data will be retained only for as long as we need it to fulfil the purpose for which we have collected it and, if applicable, as long as required by statutory retention requirements.

IX. Your rights

Under the legislation applicable to you, you may be entitled to exercise some or all of the following rights:

  1. require (i) information as to whether your personal data is retained and (ii) access to and/or copies of your personal data retained, including the purposes of the processing, the categories of personal data concerned, and the data recipients as well as potential retention periods;
  2. request rectification, removal or restriction of your personal data, e.g. because (i) it is incomplete or inaccurate, (ii) it is no longer needed for the purposes for which it was collected, or (iii) the consent on which the processing was based has been withdrawn;
  3. refuse to provide and – without impact to data processing activities that have taken place before such withdrawal – withdraw your consent to processing of your personal data at any time;
  4. object, on grounds relating to your particular situation, that your personal data shall be subject to processing. In this case, please provide us with information about your particular situation. After the assessment of the facts presented by you we will either stop processing your personal data or present you with the legitimate grounds for ongoing processing;
  5. take legal actions in relation to any potential breach of your rights regarding the processing of your personal data, as well as to lodge complaints before the competent data protection regulators;
  6. require (i) to receive the personal data concerning you, which you have provided to us, in a structured, commonly used and machine-readable format and (ii) to transmit that data to another controller without hindrance from our side; where technically feasible you shall have the right to have the personal data transmitted directly from us to another controller; and/or
  7. not to be subject to any automated decision making, including profiling (automatic decisions based on data processing by automatic means, for the purpose of assessing several personal aspects) which produce legal effects on you, or affects you with similar significance.

You may (i) exercise the rights referred to above or (ii) pose any questions or (iii) make any complaints regarding our data processing by contacting us using the contact details set out below.

X. Contacting us

For matters related to your registration and data stored within specific journals, please refer to contact persons listed at the journal’s homepage.

Please submit any questions, concerns or comments you have about this privacy policy or any requests concerning your personal data by email to our Group Data Protection Officer. You can contact our Group Data Protection Officer via customerservice@springernature.com .

The information you provide when contacting us at customerservice@springernature.com will be processed to handle your request and will be erased when your request is completed. Alternatively, we will restrict the processing of the respective information in accordance with statutory retention requirements.

XI. Amendments to this policy

We reserve the right to amend this policy from time to time by updating our website respectively. Please visit the site regularly to ensure you have access to the most up-to-date policy.

Annex 1: Notes to external editors/reviewers

In the course of the collaboration between Springer Nature and external editors and reviewers, Springer Nature transfers personal data to the editors and reviewers. The editors and reviewers process this personal data in their own responsibility as independent controllers. Thus, the editors and reviewers have to comply with the applicable regulations of data protection law, in particular with respect to the EU General Data Protection Regulation (GDPR). This entails the following obligations with regard to the data processing:

  1. Editors and reviewers need to respect the principles of lawfulness, fairness and transparency of the data processing and document their compliance with the applicable obligations. This means that personal data may only be processed for specified, explicit and legitimate purposes and the processing shall be limited to what is absolutely necessary in relation to these purposes. Processing must be transparent to the persons whose data is processed, and persons whose data is processed may have certain rights, in particular with respect to access to or deletion and correction of such data. Personal data shall generally not be used for purposes other than the ones it was collected for.
  2. Personal data may only be processed if permitted by a legal basis. For example, this is the case if an editor processes reviewer data to identify appropriate reviewers, invite and/or select them for assignment. Further, reviewer and editors may need to process author data to enable and foster effective communication between the different parties. Personal data should not be proliferated to third parties without a solid reason.
  3. When processing personal data adequate measures should be implemented to ensure the protection and secrecy of the data. This includes measures to prevent that the data is accessed by unauthorised third parties, e.g. by using keys and/or passwords for the relevant systems and data encryption if possible, or that data is deleted or amended accidentally, e.g. by using backup systems. If the data is no longer needed for the purposes it was collected for, e.g. if the review is completed and the journal published, the data needs to be deleted/destroyed, unless there are grounds that justify longer retention. Those reasons may arise from journalistic duties, documentation obligations and accounting or tax obligations.

Annex 2: Online Services and Tools

  1. We use the following tools and services to enhance and improve the submission to publication workflow system. For more information on how personal data is processed please click on the respective links below:
    SparkPost https://www.sparkpost.com/policies/privacy/
    Scanii https://docs.scanii.com/privacy-policy.html
    Slimmer AI https://awa.tgho.nl/static/console/privacy_statement.pdf
    Freshdesk https://www.freshworks.com/privacy/
    Pingdom https://www.solarwinds.com/legal/privacy
    SpeedCurve https://speedcurve.com/terms/
    Crossref API https://www.crossref.org/privacy/
    Grid API https://www.grid.ac/pages/privacy
    Airbrake https://airbrake.io/privacy
    Overleaf https://www.overleaf.com/legal#Privacy
    Hotjar https://www.hotjar.com/legal/policies/privacy/
    Trustpilot https://www.trustpilot.com/
  2. This privacy policy describes the processing of personal data in relation to the Springer Nature submission to publication workflow syst em only. For information on how we use your personal data more widely on our websites, including cookies, online advertising and ecommerce related tools, please see the appropriate journal homepage below:

    Nature Research - https://www.nature.com/info/privacy
    BMC - https://www.biomedcentral.com/privacy-statement
    SpringerLink - https://link.springer.com/privacystatement
    Springer - https://www.springer.com/gp/privacy-policy