By using the Online Platform, you agree to the collection, processing and storage of your information as described in this policy, for the professional purposes set out below.

1. Information we collect

1.1 Information you give us

When you register, submit a manuscript or proposal, write to us, or buy something on the Online Platform, you may give us:

• Name and contact details: name, postal address, email, telephone or mobile number, fax.
• Academic and professional details: qualifications, designation, institution or employer, areas of expertise, your institute (chosen from our list), the keywords of your field you add in My Keywords, and your ORCID iD if you add it.
• Details of other people: when you add co-authors to a manuscript or suggest reviewers, you give us their name, email, institute and keywords. Please make sure they agree to this.
• Account details: User ID and password.
• Manuscripts and related files: the manuscript, figures, data, cover letter, author details, and reviewer reports.
• Orders: what you bought, billing and delivery address. Card and banking details are entered on the payment gateway’s own page (CCAvenue or PayPal); we never capture or store them.
• Messages: comments, questions, feedback and other things you send us.
• Messages to a scholar: if you use the Contact button on a scholar profile, your name, email, the institution or position you give (optional), the subject and your message. If you are not signed in, you first confirm your email with a code.
• Library membership: if you join a library on the Online Platform, or a librarian adds you, the library, your department, your role (for example student, teacher or research scholar) and how long your access lasts.
• Publishers: when a publisher applies for a Publisher Portal account, the publisher’s name, contact person, email, phone, address, website, GSTIN and a short description; later, in My Profile, the bank account to which we pay the publisher. Gatha Cognition staff use these to check the application and to pay the publisher.
• Invitations to a librarian: if you use “Invite your librarian” on an institute or scholar page, the librarian’s name and email, the institute and your message.

1.2 Information collected automatically

Our server and our partners record technical information when you use the Online Platform, such as your IP address, browser type, the pages you visit and the date and time of your visit. When you read paid content through a library, we also record which article, chapter or book you opened and when (see Section 5). Section 4 explains cookies and how you can control them.

When you have a Manuscript Portal account, we keep a copy of the emails we send you in your account (Updates), so you can read them again. Sign-in codes and password links are not kept.

1.3 Information from public sources

• Fetch from ORCID: on the forms where a person is entered (registration, My Profile, co-authors, suggested reviewers, and editors adding reviewers), you can type an ORCID iD and click Fetch from ORCID. We then read that person’s public ORCID record (name, affiliation, and email only if the person made it public) and put it in the empty boxes of the form. Nothing already typed is replaced, and nothing is saved until the form is saved. Information the person keeps private on ORCID is never available to us.
• Finding reviewers: to find independent experts to review a manuscript, the editorial office may search public scholarly databases (OpenAlex, ORCID and Crossref) for researchers who have published on the topic, and note their name, affiliation, publications and public contact details. An expert found this way is contacted only if an editor invites them, and may decline or ask us to remove their details.

2. How we use your information

• To run your account and sign you in.
• To process manuscript submissions, peer review, editorial decisions, proofs and publication.
• To match people to topics: your keywords and published work help us suggest you to editors as a reviewer and send you calls for papers and new articles in your field. Your My Keywords list is private and not shown on public pages.
• To process orders, payments, delivery of printed books and access to digital content.
• To answer your questions, requests and comments.
• To send you service emails about your manuscript, review or order, and to tell you about our products, services, offers and calls for papers. You can ask us to stop the promotional emails at any time.
• To keep the Online Platform secure and prevent fraud and spam.
• To meet our legal, tax and regulatory obligations.

3. Legal basis for processing

• Your consent: for example analytics cookies and marketing emails. You may withdraw it at any time.
• A contract with you: for example handling your submission or your order.
• A legal obligation: for example keeping invoices.
• Our legitimate interests: for example the security of the Online Platform and research integrity checks, balanced against your rights.

4. Cookies, consent and analytics

We do not use advertising or third-party tracking tools. Our share buttons are plain links: nothing is sent to a social network unless you click one of them. Besides the essential cookies, we use Google Analytics and one small cookie when you arrive through a link in one of our own adverts (explained below). You decide about both.

Google Analytics. We use Google Analytics 4 to count visits and see which pages are read, so we can improve the site. It uses Google Consent Mode:

• Advertising storage and ad personalisation are always off. The site shows no ads.
• For readers in the European Economic Area, the UK and Switzerland, analytics cookies stay off until you allow them. A small notice at the bottom of the page asks you once, with Allow and No thanks.
• Elsewhere, analytics is on by default, and you can turn it off at any time.
• Your answer is kept for a year in a small cookie (gc_analytics).

The site also uses essential cookies, such as the session cookie that keeps you signed in and your shopping cart. These are needed for the site to work and cannot be switched off.

The Gatha Cognition app. On an Android phone you can install our site as an app, from the site itself or, when it is available there, from Google Play. The app is our website opened full-screen, with the same account, so this policy applies to it in the same way. It does not read your contacts, photos or location. To work when the connection drops, it keeps a copy of a simple “you are offline” page on your phone; it never stores the books, articles or audio you bought. If you choose “later” on the install banner, that choice is kept in your browser for 30 days. The Google Play version sets one more essential cookie (gc_app) so that the site knows it is open in that app.

Links in our own adverts. The pictures and posts we share on WhatsApp, Facebook, Instagram, YouTube and LinkedIn carry short links to our site (gathacognition.com/p/…). When you open one, we count the click and send you on to the book, article or journal page, with tags in the address that tell Google Analytics which post you came from. To count visitors rather than clicks, we keep a scrambled code made from your connection and browser that changes every day; we do not store your IP address. The page you land on may also keep a small cookie (gc_promo) for 30 days that holds only the advert’s code. If you order within that time, the order is marked as coming from that advert. This cookie follows your analytics choice. In the European Economic Area, the UK and Switzerland it is set only after you choose Allow on the analytics notice. Elsewhere it is set unless you have turned analytics off. Choosing No thanks removes it. We use this only to see which of our adverts are useful. It is never shared or used to show you adverts. You can delete it at any time by clearing your browser’s cookies.

5. How we share your information

We share information only as needed to run the Online Platform and our publishing work:

• Within the editorial process: editors and reviewers see what they need for a manuscript. Peer review is double-blind, so reviewers do not see the authors’ names.
• Related parties: publishers whose books you order, agents, licensors and institutes, for example for dispatch of an order or institutional access.
• Your library: while you are a member of a library, its Library Admin (the librarian) sees your name, email, department, role, membership dates, and which of the library’s articles, chapters and books you opened and when. The library uses this to manage access, renew memberships, send you library notices and report use to its institution. The librarian can also send you a link to set or reset your password. Leaving the library stops new records; earlier records stay in the library’s use report.
• Certificates: a certificate we issue to you (publication, reviewing, editorial service, or a library’s membership and appreciation certificates) can be checked by anyone who has its code or QR code. The check page shows only what is printed on the certificate: your name and affiliation, your role, and the work, journal or book and dates. A reviewing certificate never names an unpublished manuscript.
• A scholar you write to: we email the scholar your name, email, institution (if given), subject and message, with your email as the reply address, and keep a copy in their account. The scholar’s email address is not shown to you on the profile. Authors and reviewers can turn these messages off at any time; editors stay reachable as part of their role. We limit how many messages can be sent, to prevent spam.
• A librarian you invite: we email the librarian your name and message, with your email address as the reply address. We keep a record of the invitation to prevent repeated or unwanted emails.
• Service providers that work for us, listed below, plus our bank, email service providers, shipping and courier agents, and hosting and IT service providers.

Service	What it does	What it receives
CCAvenue, PayPal	Online payment	Order amount, your name, contact and billing details, and the card or bank details you enter on their page.
Google Firebase	Sends a one-time password (OTP) by SMS when you verify your mobile number	Your mobile number.
Google Analytics	Visit statistics	Pages visited, device and browser data, approximate location (see Section 4).
Turnitin	Similarity (plagiarism) check of manuscripts	The manuscript file and title (see Section 6).
Crossref	DOI registration of published work	Published metadata, including authors’ names, affiliations and ORCID iDs (see Section 7).
ORCID	Fills a form from a person’s public ORCID record when you click Fetch from ORCID (see Section 1.3)	Only the ORCID iD typed in the form.
OpenAlex	Citation counts for our publications, and finding experts on a topic to invite as reviewers (see Section 1.3)	The DOIs of our published works, and the topic words of a search. No personal data of yours.
Brevo	Delivers our emails	Your name and email address, and the content of the email.
ROR (Research Organization Registry)	Finds an institute that is not yet on our list when you search for one	Only the words typed in the institute search. No personal data.
IndexNow (Bing and other search engines)	Tells search engines about newly published pages	Only the page address. No personal data.
Meta (Facebook) and Google (YouTube)	We post our own adverts for our books, articles and journals to our Facebook Pages and YouTube channel	Only our own pictures, videos and text. No personal data of yours. We do not read or collect information about the people who see or react to these posts. When you use Facebook, Instagram, YouTube, LinkedIn or WhatsApp, their own privacy policies apply.

We may also disclose information to comply with the law, a regulation or a court order, or to protect the rights, property or safety of GATHA COGNITION^® or users of the Online Platform.

We do not sell your personal information to third parties.

6. Manuscripts under review

A manuscript under review is confidential, unpublished work. Only the editorial office, the handling editor and the invited reviewers can open it.

• Similarity check. Every submitted manuscript is checked with Turnitin (iThenticate). We send Turnitin the manuscript file and its title; your account is identified to Turnitin only by an internal number, not your name or email. The similarity report is shared with the editor, the reviewers and the author.
• AI-assisted pre-review. Before review, the editorial office may run a technical screening with an AI tool approved by us, under terms by which submitted content is not used to train AI models. The report is seen only by the editorial office and the handling editor, never by reviewers or authors, and every decision is made by a human editor. Details: AI Use Policy, Section 5b.
• Reviewers and editors must not upload a manuscript to any AI tool or share it with anyone.

7. Published and public information

Publishing is public by nature. When your article, chapter or book is published:

• Your name, affiliation, ORCID iD (if given), corresponding email (if shown in the article) and the work itself appear on the Online Platform.
• The publication metadata, including authors’ names, affiliations and ORCID iDs, is deposited with Crossref for the DOI. Crossref makes this metadata public, and indexing services such as Google Scholar and OpenAlex may pick it up.
• Each author with published work has a public scholar profile page listing their name, affiliation, ORCID iD, publications and citation metrics. Editorial board members are listed with name and affiliation on journal pages, and reviewers are acknowledged by name in the published issue.
• Public institute pages list the scholars of that institute with published work, and topic (keyword) pages list the published works on a topic with their authors.

Published records are kept permanently as part of the scholarly record and cannot be erased, but we will correct mistakes in them on request.

8. International data transfers

The Online Platform is used worldwide, and your information may be stored and processed in countries other than your own, including India and the countries where our service providers operate. When we transfer information internationally, we take reasonable steps to protect it as required by law, including any restrictions under India’s Digital Personal Data Protection (DPDP) Act on cross-border transfer and, for EU/UK users, appropriate safeguards such as Standard Contractual Clauses where required.

9. Data retention

We keep your personal information while your account is active, and afterwards for as long as needed to meet our legal, accounting, tax and regulatory obligations or to resolve disputes. Manuscript records and reviews are kept as part of the editorial record. Published work is kept permanently (Section 7).

10. Data security

We take reasonable technical and organisational measures to protect your information against loss, misuse and unauthorised access. These include:

• encrypted (HTTPS) connections for every page;
• passwords stored only in a scrambled (hashed) form that even we cannot read;
• sign-in blocked for a while after repeated wrong passwords;
• access by role: authors, reviewers, editors, publishers and readers see only what their role needs, and manuscript files open only for the people on that manuscript;
• protection against forged form submissions from other websites;
• card and bank details entered only on the payment provider’s own pages (CCAvenue or PayPal); we never receive or store them.

Please keep your password confidential. You are responsible for any loss or misuse that results from sharing it.

If a breach happens. If personal information we hold is lost, disclosed or accessed without permission, we will act at once to contain it, inform the Data Protection Board of India and the people affected as required by the Digital Personal Data Protection Act, 2023 and its Rules (and the relevant authority for EU/UK residents), and tell those affected what happened, what it may mean for them and what they can do.

Report a security problem. If you find a weakness in our website or app, please write to office@gathacognition.com with the subject “Security”, with enough detail for us to reproduce it. Please do not access, change or delete other people’s data, and give us reasonable time to fix the problem before making it public. We will reply and keep you informed.

11. Your rights

Depending on where you live, you may have some or all of these rights:

• Access the personal information we hold about you.
• Correct inaccurate or incomplete information.
• Ask us to erase your information, subject to our legal retention obligations and the scholarly record (Section 7).
• Restrict or object to certain processing.
• Withdraw your consent at any time, where processing is based on consent.
• Receive a copy of your information in a portable format.
• Nominate another person to use these rights for you if you die or become unable to act (a right under India’s DPDP Act); write to us with the person’s name and contact details.
• Complain to your local data protection authority (EU/UK residents) or to the Data Protection Board of India (for grievances under the DPDP Act).

Registered users can update their own details from My Profile in their account, and authors and reviewers can turn off messages from their scholar profile in Profile Messages. To close your account or delete your information, write to us (Section 14); the Delete your account page explains how, and what is deleted and what is kept. One request covers the website and the app. You are responsible for the accuracy of the information you give us. We will respond within the time required by applicable law.

12. Children’s privacy

The Online Platform is not directed at children. Use is restricted to those aged 18 or above, or a minor accompanied by an adult, as set out in our Terms and Conditions. We do not knowingly collect personal information from children without appropriate consent.

13. Changes to this policy

We may update this policy by publishing a revised version on this page, with a new “Last updated” date at the top. Please check this page from time to time.