Privacy Policy

Scholar Journal is operated by Publinexa Pvt. Ltd., registered in Bengaluru, India. When this policy refers to "Scholar Journal", "we", "us", or "our", it means Publinexa Pvt. Ltd. Questions about this policy can be directed to privacy@publinexa.com.

Account data: name, email address, institutional affiliation, ORCID iD, and password (stored as a bcrypt hash — we never store plaintext passwords).

Submission data: manuscript files, author details, co-author email addresses, funding information, and correspondence with editors.

Payment data: your name, email, and the transaction ID and amount from Razorpay. We do not store your card number or CVV — these are handled entirely by Razorpay's PCI-DSS certified infrastructure.

Usage data: pages viewed, search queries, journal downloads, and browser/device type. Collected via server-side logs and a self-hosted analytics instance (no third-party tracking cookies).

Account management: to authenticate you, send password reset emails, and maintain your dashboard.

Publication process: to coordinate peer review, send editorial decisions, and publish accepted articles. Author names and affiliations are published openly as part of the academic record.

Payments: to process article-processing charges and issue invoices and refunds.

Platform improvement: aggregated, anonymised usage data helps us improve the platform. We do not use your data for advertising or sell it to third parties.

Legal obligations: we may disclose data if required by law or to protect the rights, property, or safety of Scholar Journal or its users.

We use only the following cookies:

Session cookie: a secure, HTTP-only cookie that keeps you logged in for the duration of your browser session. Expires when you close the browser or log out.

CSRF token: a short-lived cookie used to protect form submissions from cross-site request forgery attacks.

We do not use advertising, tracking, or analytics cookies from third-party services.

Account data is retained for as long as your account is active. If you delete your account, personal data (name, email, institution) is anonymised within 30 days. Manuscript and publication data — including author names on published articles — is retained indefinitely as part of the permanent scientific record.

Payment records are retained for 7 years to comply with Indian GST and accounting regulations.

Under applicable data protection law (including the Indian Digital Personal Data Protection Act 2023), you have the right to:

• Access the personal data we hold about you • Correct inaccurate data • Request erasure of data (subject to our legal obligations and legitimate interests in maintaining the scientific record) • Object to processing • Data portability (receive your data in a machine-readable format)

To exercise any of these rights, email privacy@publinexa.com. We will respond within 30 days.

Razorpay — payment processing. Subject to Razorpay's privacy policy. Amazon Web Services (S3) — manuscript file storage. Files are encrypted at rest and in transit. SendGrid / SMTP — transactional email delivery.

No third-party service has access to your manuscript content for any purpose other than secure storage and delivery.

All data is transmitted over TLS 1.2 or higher. Manuscript files are stored in a private S3 bucket accessible only via time-limited pre-signed URLs. Passwords are hashed with bcrypt (cost factor 12). We conduct security reviews periodically and follow responsible disclosure procedures.

We will notify registered users by email at least 14 days before making material changes to this policy. Continued use of the platform after that date constitutes acceptance of the updated policy.