Privacy Statement

Handling of personal data in Open Journal Systems (OJS)

1.  Introduction

This agreement regulates the processing of personal data in Open Journal System, OJS, which is run by LiU E-Press, a part of Linköping University and used by hosted journals. As part of running a journal it is necessary to process personal data about authors, reviewers, editors and administrators. In this document all those are named users.

This agreement does not regulate copyright but only the storing of personal data according to the General Data Protection Regulation EU 2016/679; (GDPR)

2.  The purpose of processing personal data in OJS

Personal data is processed in OJS in accordance with GDPR for the purpose of identifying authors, reviewers, editors, and administrators. Specifically:

  1. It is necessary for a reader to be able to identify authors in order to cite an article published via OJS. It is also necessary to provide a reader with information regarding authors’ affiliation and the e-mail address of the corresponding author, in case a reader has questions regarding a published article.
  2. Processing of reviewers’ personal data is necessary to keep track of which reviewers have been contacted for reviewing, accepted or declined reviewing and completed reviewing. (see article 3 below).
  3. It is necessary to process personal data for the editors and guest editors of a journal to afterwards be able to follow the editorial process.

3.  Personal data processed in OJS

In OJS the following information is processed for authors, reviewers and editors:

  • given name,
  • family name,
  • affiliation (university, department, sub-department, city, country),
  • ORCID (only for authors, if available),
  • e-mail address (not mandatory),
  • username in OJS,
  • password (encrypted)

Affiliation may vary depending on where authors are working if it is not a University i.e. the affiliation might be a private company or a research institute etc.

4.  Displaying personal data in public

The personal data of authors are (except of username and password) displayed publicly via the journal's website adjacent to the published article. The journal may also list the editorial board members with names and e-mail address on a journal’s website. Personal data of reviewers and editors of specific articles are not displayed in public and cannot be seen or accessed by any person without authorization.

If the journal moves to another publisher or will be discontinued, LiU E-press stores a copy of the published articles and the personal data of reviewers and editors in OJS. Personal data will hence be processed even after the journal is discontinued.

5.  Conveying Data to Other Stakeholders

The published personal data according to section 4 above may be copied to other stakeholders for indexing scientific articles and in the case that the journal decides to change publisher. However, the personal data not publicly viewed in OJS will remain in OJS and not be sold, copied or in other form transferred to a third party. If a journal decides to move their publication to another publisher, the personal data of authors, editors and reviewers may be transferred to the new publisher when they have been informed by e-mail in line with GDPR regulations.

6.  Statistics and Cookies

Research funders may require statistics about from which countries the authors come from, to give funds for the journal to operate. Such information is stored as affiliation.

Other statistics may be required such as number of visitors to a journal’s or article’s website, number of downloads of pdf files, citations to articles etc.

OJS uses session cookies for the functionality of the login sessions. Visitor’s IP addresses together with visiting time, pages visited, and browser information are stored and analyzed in OJS as long as the journal is hosted by LiU E-press.

7.  Deleting Personal Data from OJS

The journal editorial team can decide if the personal data for the reviewers and editors should be deleted after publishing each volume and issue of the journal or delete the personal data if the journal is no longer active. Upon request by a user an account can be deleted. However, it is not possible to delete any published personal data for authors as stated in 2 a.

8.  Responsibility and Contact

The personal data controller for the personal data mentioned above is Linköping University.

The publishing platform OJS is provided by the Public Knowledge Project (system developer and supplier) and Linköping University processes personal data via OJS on a local server. The platform is used for electronic registration, publication and archiving of publications from several journals hosted by Linköping University.

The legal basis for the processing of the basic information is that it is necessary to process personal data of users in order to fulfill the agreement to publish an article that an authorhas entered into with a journal hosted by LiU E-Press. The legal basis for information provided voluntarily is that the user has consented to the treatment by voluntarily leaving it. Users can contact Linköping University if they want information about the data LiU E-Press has about them, if they want to exercise their rights under the Data Protection Ordinance, to request corrections, deletion or to request a limitation of the processing of personal data  Users can do this most easily by contacting Linköping university via, registrator@liu.se or by phone 013 28 10 00. Authors can reach our Data Protection Officer at dataskyddsombud@liu.se. If authors have a complaint about LiU E-Press’ processing of their personal data, they have the right to contact the Swedish Authority for Privacy Protection (Integritetsskyddsmyndigheten).

If there are any questions, please contact LiU E-Press via ep@ep.liu.se.