What we collect, and what we do not
This page describes what actually happens in our software, not what a template says might happen. If something here stops being true, the page is wrong and we will change it.
Smart Scholars · 304, MK Residency, Srinivasa Colony, Uppal, Hyderabad – 500039, Telangana, India · mou@smartscholars.in
If you only read the pages
Nothing is asked of you. No account, no tracking pixel, no advertising network, no analytics that follows you to other sites. Our web host keeps ordinary server logs — the address of the request, the time, the page — which is how every web server on the internet works.
One cookie is set, and only if you change the language: it remembers which language you chose, for a year. You can delete it and the site works exactly as before, in English.
If you use the contact form
The form on this site asks for your name, your email address, and — optionally — your journal name, its address, its ISSN and your message. Those six things are emailed to us. They are not written to a database and they are not passed to anyone else.
The form also carries a hidden field that must stay empty and a note of when the page loaded. Both exist to tell a person from a robot, and neither says anything about you.
There is a second form inside Journal Audit — Request a service — and that one is different: because it belongs to your account, it is saved with it, along with the service you asked for and the audit it refers to. You get a copy by email at the same moment we do.
If you use the Ask AI button
What you type is sent to the AI provider that answers it, along with the last few turns of that conversation so the answer makes sense. The provider is named in the panel. We keep a count of how many messages one browser session has sent, to stop abuse, and nothing else: no transcript is stored on our servers.
The conversation itself lives in your own browser and disappears when you close the tab. Please do not type passwords or anything confidential into it — that is true of every chat box, ours included.
If you have an account with us
Journal Audit, GetIndexed and DOI Doctor keep what the service needs: your email address, the journals you have added, and the work we have done on them.
Where you choose to store a credential so you do not have to type it again — a Crossref login, an OJS key — it is encrypted before it is written down, and it is used only for that journal and only for the work you asked for. We never need it for anything else, and you can remove it at any time.
What we never do
- We do not sell, rent or trade anything about you. There is no advertising on any of our sites and no advertising network is given access to them.
- We do not build a profile of you across sites, and we run no third-party tracking scripts.
- We do not publish a client's name, or anything identifying them, without that client's agreement. Where we describe our own work publicly, the figures are counted across journals and name none of them.
- We do not use your journal's content to train anything.
The public record
Most of what our tools read is already public: Crossref, OpenAlex, the ISSN Portal, DOAJ, the Keepers Registry, and a journal's own website. Reading a public register tells that register only that a request was made — it carries nothing about you. Where we write to a register on your behalf, we write the metadata you approved, and nothing more.
How long we keep things
Contact messages stay in our mailbox until they are no longer useful. Account data stays while the account exists. Stored credentials stay until you remove them or close the account. Server logs are kept by our host for a short period and then rotate away.
Asking for your data, or its removal
Write to us and we will tell you what we hold, send you a copy, correct it, or delete it. There is no form to fill in and no account required.
How to have your data deleted → Email us
Changes, and who to talk to
If this page changes we will change the date below. If you think something here is wrong, or you are unhappy with how we have handled your data, write to us first — we would rather fix it than have you go elsewhere with it.
Last updated: 19 September 2026 · Smart Scholars, 304, MK Residency, Srinivasa Colony, Uppal, Hyderabad – 500039, Telangana, India · mou@smartscholars.in · +91-9885134413
