Privacy policy

Alert Scholar is run from Ontario, Canada. In this policy, “we” and “us” mean Alert Scholar. You can reach us at privacy@alertscholar.com.

• Your account: your email addresses (any you add is confirmed with a code we email to it), and when you sign in with Google, the name and profile picture on that Google account, or a photo you upload instead. Your picture is shown only to you. When we email you a code, we keep a scrambled copy of it for a day at most.
• Who you are as a researcher: the author in OpenAlex you tell us is you, and from it your name as you publish, your institution and a first guess at your role, which you can change in Settings. We ask your role to understand who uses Alert Scholar; it’s optional.
• Your research: the ORCID iD, DOIs, Zotero library or BibTeX and RIS files you give us, the details of those papers, and the questions you describe in your own words.
• Zotero or Mendeley, if you connect one: the access it grants (a key or tokens, stored encrypted), and the DOI, arXiv or PubMed ID and collections of each paper in your library, so we can skip papers you already have, show which papers are in it and follow the collections you choose. Not your notes or files. A paper goes into your library only when you add it. Disconnecting deletes the access and this list.
• How you use Alert Scholar: the papers you save or dismiss and the reasons you give, your delivery settings, the ratings you give from our emails, and which pages and features you use.
• The waitlist: your email address and, if you tell us, your field.
• Technical information: logs such as IP address, browser type and error reports. On our public pages we also count visits and note which site linked to us, without cookies and without identifying you.

We use this information to understand your research, find and rank new papers for you and explain each match; to send your digests, the feeds and webhooks you set up, and messages about your account or invite; to improve how well matching works; and to keep Alert Scholar secure and running. We don’t sell your information, and we don’t use it for advertising.

To understand your research and new papers, we send paper details, such as titles and abstracts, and the descriptions you write to our AI providers, Google (Gemini) and OpenAI, through their paid services. Under those services’ terms, they don’t use what we send to train their models. The questions you describe may be about unpublished work; we use them only to find papers for you.

A few service providers help us run Alert Scholar: Render (hosting and database), Resend (email delivery), PostHog (analytics and error tracking) and our AI providers, Google (Gemini) and OpenAI. They process information only to provide their service to us. To find your papers, we look up the name, ORCID iD or paper you give us in OpenAlex, the open index of research we read papers from. We may also disclose information when the law requires it. We never show your research to other users.

If you add a feed link or a webhook in Settings, we send the papers it covers, with our notes on how each relates to your work and the names of your research interests, wherever you point it: your feed reader, or an address you give, such as a Zapier, Make or n8n workflow. What happens to them there is up to that service and its terms. Anyone who has a feed link can read it, so keep it private; removing it in Settings turns it off.

If you connect an AI assistant such as Claude or ChatGPT, by signing in from it or with a personal key, it can read your papers and our notes, save papers or mark them not relevant, and change your research interests when you ask it to. What it does with them is up to its provider and their terms. If you send a research interest to a Slack channel, its papers and our notes post there, where everyone in the channel can see them. Disconnecting an assistant, deleting a key or removing a channel in Settings stops it at once.

Our servers are in the United States, and some providers may process information in other countries. Where the law requires it, we use safeguards such as standard contractual clauses.

We keep your information while your account is open. If you delete your account, we delete your information within 30 days, apart from anything the law requires us to keep, and backups are overwritten within 7 days. Waitlist entries are deleted once you accept your invite, or earlier if you ask.

You can ask to see, correct, export or delete your information at any time by emailing privacy@alertscholar.com, and we’ll reply within 30 days. You can also delete your account yourself in Settings. Every email has a one-click unsubscribe link.

In Canada, you can complain to the Office of the Privacy Commissioner of Canada. If you’re in the EU or UK, you also have rights under the GDPR, including the right to object to processing and to complain to your data protection authority.

We use a small number of essential cookies to keep you signed in and remember your settings. If we ever add cookies for analytics, we’ll ask first.

Alert Scholar is for researchers and isn’t meant for anyone under 16.

If we change how we use your information, we’ll update this page and email you before the change takes effect.

privacy@alertscholar.com