How we handle your data

What is collected

Only what you type into the join form or your dashboard: your name, email address, career stage, institution, city and country, a biography, research interests, an ORCID iD, links to your website and LinkedIn, and a photograph if you upload one. Nothing is bought, scraped or added from anywhere else.

The site also keeps what it needs to work: a record of the sign-in links and sessions issued for your address, a copy of every message sent to you, and a log of what the steering group did with your profile and when. There is no analytics code, no advertising and no tracking of what you read here.

What is public

Your profile page and your directory card, which show your name, career stage, interests, biography, links, publications, and your institution and location if you have chosen to show them. Your email address is private unless you switch it on yourself. It is off by default.

The newsletter list is never public, and it is kept separately from the directory. Being on it does not create a profile.

Publications and ORCID

If you give an ORCID iD, the publication list on your profile is read from your public ORCID record and refreshed from it. We do not edit it and we do not add to it by hand, so correcting a publication means correcting it in ORCID. Remove the iD from your profile and the publication list goes with it. Your ORCID record can also be used to fill the join form in, which happens only when you ask for it and saves nothing until you submit the form.

You decide what shows

Every visibility choice lives in your dashboard and takes effect immediately:

• Hide your institution.
• Hide your city and country.
• Show your email address, or keep it private.
• Take yourself out of the public directory while keeping your account.
• Remove your profile from the site.

Hiding your profile takes it out of the directory, out of search within the site and off your public page. Removing it takes your entry off the site altogether, along with your interests and the publication list read from ORCID. Two things are kept either way, because they are the record of what was done and by whom: the log of review decisions, and the messages already sent to you.

Who can see the rest

Your email address and anything you have hidden are visible to the steering group, who moderate the directory, and to nobody else. Behind the site there are providers for hosting, email delivery and backups, who hold the data only in order to do that work. It is not sold, shared with advertisers or used to train anything.

Asking us

For a copy of what is held about you, a correction you cannot make yourself, or a removal you would rather we did for you, write to the steering group through wicb.co.uk.