Privacy and Cookies Policy

Last updated: 2 August 2026

1. Introduction

1.1 We are committed to safeguarding the privacy of our website visitors, service users, individual customers and customer personnel.

1.2 This policy applies where we are acting as a data controller with respect to the personal data of such persons; in other words, where we determine the purposes and means of the processing of that personal data.

1.3 We do not use tracking cookies on our website. We only use cookies that are strictly necessary for the provision of our website and services, with the exception of the Google invisible reCAPTCHA in our publication system and Cloudflare Turnstile on our website contact form, which may set cookies for security purposes.

1.4 In this policy, “we”, “us” and “our” refer to Advances.in LTD. For more information about us, see Section 16.

2. The personal data that we collect

2.1 In this Section 2 we have set out the general categories of personal data that we process and, in the case of personal data that we did not obtain directly from you, information about the source and specific categories of that data.

2.2 We may process data enabling us to get in touch with you (contact data). The contact data may include your name, email address, telephone number, and/or postal address. In case of payments for reviews or editing, it may include your bank details. The source of the contact data is you, save for contact data that we obtain from publicly available professional sources, which is described in Section 2.13.

2.3 We may process your website user account data (account data). The account data may include your account identifier, ORCID number, name, email address, business name, information about your research field and topics, reviews and other evaluations you submit, articles that you submit, correspondence between you and us or other users of this page, account creation and modification dates, website settings and marketing preferences. The primary source of the account data is you, although some elements of the account data may be generated by our website.

2.4 We may process your information included in your personal profile on our website (profile data). The profile data may include your name, address, telephone number, email address, profile pictures, gender, ethnicity, research field and topics, educational details and employment details. The source of the profile data is you.

2.5 We may process information relating to our customer relationships (customer relationship data). The customer relationship data may include your name, the name of your business or employer, your job title or role, your contact details, your classification / categorisation within our customer relationship management system and information contained in or relating to communications between us and you, or between us and your employer, your banking details. The source of the customer relationship data is you.

2.6 We may process your personal data that are provided in the course of the use of our services and generated by our services in the course of such use (service data). The service data may include evaluations of your work for us, reviews, correspondence between authors, editors and reviewers. The source of the service data is you and/or your employer and/or our services.

2.7 We may process information relating to transactions, including purchases of goods and/or services that you enter into with us and/or through our website and payment for your services (transaction data). The transaction data may include your name, your contact details, your payment card details (or other payment details) and the transaction details. The source of the transaction data is you.

2.8 We may process information contained in or relating to any communication that you send to us or that we send to you, or communication that you send or receive from editors and authors (communication data). The communication data may include the communication content and metadata associated with the communication. Our website will generate the metadata associated with communications made using the website contact forms.

2.9 We may process data about your use of our website and services (usage data). Our website operates behind Cloudflare, which acts as a content delivery network and web application firewall. All requests to our website therefore pass through Cloudflare’s network, which processes your IP address, request headers, user-agent string and requested URL in order to route traffic and to detect and block malicious requests. Where a request is flagged by our security rules, Cloudflare records these details, including your IP address, in a security event log retained in accordance with our Cloudflare service plan. We do not store raw IP addresses in our own systems. For aggregate geographic statistics, we derive a 2-letter country code from each visitor IP address using the Cloudflare CF-IPCountry header; those IP addresses are SHA-256 hashed with a site-specific salt before any caching, and the resulting country data is automatically deleted after 13 months. No tracking cookies are set by this process.

2.10 We may process information that you provide to us for the purpose of subscribing to our email notifications and/or newsletters (newsletter data). The newsletter data may include your name and email address. The source of the newsletter data is you.

2.11 Please do not supply any other person’s personal data to us, unless we prompt you to do so.

2.12 Our submission software (advances.pub) uses Google reCAPTCHA (hereinafter reCAPTCHA) to prevent spam and other attempts to abuse or compromise our services. To detect malicious activity, reCAPTCHA makes use of and analyzes various sources of information of the person using the app. This information may for instance consist of your mouse movement, your IP address, and your app usage patterns (see https://policies.google.com/privacy for details). To detect potentially malicious behavior and distinguish spam/bot from human and legitimate use of our app, reCAPTCHA transfers data to Google which has its headquarters in Mountain View, CA 94043, USA. The invisible reCAPTCHA may also set tracking cookies to perform its security checks and evaluate user interactions. Data is processed based on our legitimate interests and is essential for us to conduct our business by protecting us against attacks and malicious behavior. Please see https://policies.google.com/terms for Google’s terms of service.

2.13 We may process contact data that we obtain from publicly available professional sources rather than from you directly (outreach data). This data is limited to your name, professional email address, institutional affiliation, and the research field, topics or publications that indicate your work may be relevant to our journals. The sources of this data are publicly accessible professional and academic sources, such as institutional and faculty web pages, published articles and their corresponding-author details, and public researcher directories and profiles. Where we use such data to contact you, we will provide you with the information required under Article 14 of the UK GDPR at or before the time of our first communication, ordinarily by including a short notice and a link to this policy in that communication. You may object to this processing and unsubscribe from such communications at any time, as described in Sections 3.6 and 8, after which we will cease contacting you for these purposes.

2.14 Our website contact form uses Cloudflare Turnstile, a bot-detection service provided by Cloudflare, Inc., to prevent automated abuse of the form. To distinguish human visitors from automated traffic, Turnstile processes your IP address, your browser and device characteristics, and signals about your interaction with the page, and it may set a short-lived cookie for this purpose. The legal basis for this processing is our legitimate interests, namely protecting our website and services against spam, abuse and automated attacks. Turnstile does not use this information for advertising or cross-site tracking. Information about Cloudflare’s privacy practices is available at https://www.cloudflare.com/privacypolicy/.

3. Purposes of processing and legal bases

3.1 In this Section 3, we have set out the purposes for which we may process personal data and the legal bases of the processing.

3.2 Operations: We may process your personal data for the purposes of operating our website, the processing and fulfilment of orders, providing our services, supplying our goods, generating invoices, bills and other payment-related documentation, and credit control. The legal basis for this processing is our legitimate interests, namely the proper administration of our website, services and business and/or the performance of a contract between you and us and/or taking steps, at your request, to enter into such a contract.

3.3 Publications: We may process account data, profile data and/or service data for the purposes of publishing such data on our website and elsewhere through our services in accordance with your express instructions. The legal basis for this processing is consent.

3.4 Relationships and communications: We may process contact data, account data, customer relationship data, transaction data and/or communication data for the purposes of managing our relationships, communicating with you (excluding communicating for the purposes of direct marketing) by email, SMS, post, fax and/or telephone, providing support services and complaint handling. The legal basis for this processing is our legitimate interests, namely communications with our website visitors, service users, individual customers and customer personnel, the maintenance of our relationships, enabling the use of our services, and the proper administration of our website, services and business.

3.5 Direct marketing and newsletters: We may process contact data, account data, profile data, customer relationship data, transaction data, and newsletter data for the purposes of creating, targeting and sending direct marketing communications and newsletters by email, SMS, post and/or fax and making contact by telephone for marketing-related purposes. The legal basis for this processing is consent. You have the right to withdraw this consent and unsubscribe from our newsletter and marketing communications at any time.

3.6 Outreach to researchers and professional contacts: We may process outreach data, as described in Section 2.13, for the purpose of contacting researchers and other academic professionals to tell them about our journals, calls for papers, relevant special issues, and opportunities to contribute as authors, editors or reviewers. The legal basis for this processing is our legitimate interests, namely identifying and informing researchers whose published work and stated research interests are relevant to our journals, and the proper promotion and administration of our publishing activities. Before relying on this basis we balance those interests against your interests, rights and freedoms. You may object to this processing and unsubscribe from these communications at any time, by the means set out in any such communication or in Section 8, and we will then cease contacting you for these purposes.

3.7 Research and analysis: We may process usage data, service data and/or transaction data for the purposes of researching and analysing the use of our website and services, as well as researching and analysing other interactions with our business. The legal basis for this processing is our legitimate interests, namely monitoring, supporting, improving and securing our website, services and business generally.

3.8 Record keeping: We may process your personal data for the purposes of creating and maintaining our databases, back-up copies of our databases and our business records generally. The legal basis for this processing is our legitimate interests, namely ensuring that we have access to all the information we need to properly and efficiently run our business in accordance with this policy.

3.9 Security: We may process your personal data for the purposes of security and the prevention of fraud and other criminal activity. The legal basis of this processing is our legitimate interests, namely the protection of our website, services and business, and the protection of others.

3.10 Insurance and risk management: We may process your personal data where necessary for the purposes of obtaining or maintaining insurance coverage, managing risks and/or obtaining professional advice. The legal basis for this processing is our legitimate interests, namely the proper protection of our business against risks.

3.11 Legal claims: We may process your personal data where necessary for the establishment, exercise or defence of legal claims, whether in court proceedings or in an administrative or out-of-court procedure. The legal basis for this processing is our legitimate interests, namely the protection and assertion of our legal rights, your legal rights and the legal rights of others.

3.12 Legal compliance and vital interests: We may also process your personal data where such processing is necessary for compliance with a legal obligation to which we are subject or in order to protect your vital interests or the vital interests of another natural person.

4. Providing your personal data to others

4.1 We may disclose your personal data to any member of our group of companies (this means our subsidiaries, our ultimate holding company and all its subsidiaries) insofar as reasonably necessary for the purposes, and on the legal bases, set out in this policy. Information about our group of companies can be found at http://advances.in.

4.2 Your personal data held in our website database will be stored on the servers of our hosting services providers.

4.3 We may disclose your personal data to e-sign companies such as DocuSign insofar as reasonably necessary for signing consultations contracts between you and us.

4.4 Financial transactions relating to our website and services are handled by our payment services providers, Revolut, Stripe, and Xero. We will share transaction data with our payment services providers only to the extent necessary for the purposes of processing your payments, refunding such payments and dealing with complaints and queries relating to such payments and refunds, or paying you for your services offered to us. You can find information about the payment services providers’ privacy policies and practices at https://stripe.com/en-no/privacy, https://www.xero.com/legal/privacy/ and https://www.revolut.com/privacy-policy.

4.5 In addition to the specific disclosures of personal data set out in this Section 4, we may disclose your personal data where such disclosure is necessary for compliance with a legal obligation to which we are subject, or in order to protect your vital interests or the vital interests of another natural person. We may also disclose your personal data where such disclosure is necessary for the establishment, exercise, or defence of legal claims, whether in court proceedings or in an administrative or out-of-court procedure.

4.6 Our website is served through Cloudflare, Inc., which acts as our processor for content delivery, caching and security filtering, as described in Section 2.9. Information about Cloudflare’s privacy practices is available at https://www.cloudflare.com/privacypolicy/.

5. International transfers of your personal data

5.1 In this Section 5, we provide information about the circumstances in which your personal data may be transferred to a third country under UK data protection law.

5.2 We may transfer your personal data from the European Economic Area (EEA) to the UK and process that personal data in the UK for the purposes set out in this policy, and may permit our suppliers and subcontractors to do so, during any period with respect to which the UK is not treated as a third country under EU data protection law or benefits from an adequacy decision under EU data protection law; and we may transfer your personal data from the UK to the EEA and process that personal data in the EEA for the purposes set out in this policy, and may permit our suppliers and subcontractors to do so, during any period with respect to which EEA states are not treated as third countries under UK data protection law or benefit from adequacy regulations under UK data protection law.

5.3 We have offices and facilities in the United Kingdom.

5.4 Cloudflare, Inc., our content delivery network and security provider described in Sections 2.9 and 4.6, is established in the United States and processes personal data there and in other countries in which it operates network infrastructure. Transfers of personal data to Cloudflare are made under Cloudflare’s certification to the EU-U.S. Data Privacy Framework and the UK Extension to that framework. Where that framework does not apply to a particular transfer, the transfer is protected by the standard contractual clauses approved by the European Commission, as amended by the International Data Transfer Addendum issued by the UK Information Commissioner’s Office, as set out in Cloudflare’s data processing addendum.

5.5 You acknowledge that personal data that you submit for publication through our website or services may be available, via the internet, around the world. We cannot prevent the use (or misuse) of such personal data by others.

6. Retaining and deleting personal data

6.1 This Section 6 sets out our data retention policies and procedures, which are designed to help ensure that we comply with our legal obligations in relation to the retention and deletion of personal data.

6.2 Personal data that we process for any purpose or purposes shall not be kept for longer than is necessary for that purpose or those purposes.

6.3 We will retain your personal data as follows:

(a) contact data will be retained for a minimum period of 1 month following the date of the most recent contact between you and us, and for a maximum period of 10 years following that date;

(b) account data will be retained for a minimum period of 1 month following the date of closure of the relevant account, and for a maximum period of 1 year following that date;

(c) profile data will be retained for a minimum period of 1 month following the date of deletion of the profile by you, and for a maximum period of 2 years following that date;

(d) customer relationship data will be retained for a minimum period of 1 month following the date of termination of the relevant customer relationship and for a maximum period of 5 years following that date;

(e) service data will be retained for a minimum period of 1 month following the date of termination of the relevant contract, and for a maximum period of 10 years following that date;

(f) transaction data will be retained for a minimum period of 1 month following the date of the transaction, and for a maximum period of 20 years following that date;

(g) communication data will be retained for a minimum period of 1 month following the date of the communication in question, and for a maximum period of 20 years following that date;

(h) usage data will be retained for 13 months following the date of collection;

(i) outreach data will be retained only for as long as it remains relevant to our outreach to you and, in any event, will be deleted promptly if you object to its use, ask us to stop contacting you, or unsubscribe; and

(j) reviews and submitted articles and other work will be retained for a minimum period of 1 year following the date when the work in question was received, and indefinitely thereafter for archiving purposes in the public interest and to maintain the integrity of the published academic record.

6.4 If you grant to us a licence to publish any of your personal data, we may continue to retain and publish that personal data after the end of the relevant retention period specified in this Section 6 in accordance with the applicable licence terms, subject to your data subject rights.

6.5 Notwithstanding the other provisions of this Section 6, we may retain your personal data where such retention is necessary for compliance with a legal obligation to which we are subject, or in order to protect your vital interests or the vital interests of another natural person.

7. Security of personal data

7.1 We will take appropriate technical and organisational precautions to secure your personal data and to prevent the loss, misuse or alteration of your personal data.

7.2 We will store your personal data on secure servers, personal computers and mobile devices, and in secure manual record-keeping systems.

7.3 The following personal data will be stored by us in encrypted form: your name, contact information, password(s), cardholder data, bank account data, gender, ethnicity, research topics and interest, evaluations of your work within our system, and ORCID number.

7.4 Data relating to your enquiries and financial transactions that is sent from your web browser to our web server, or from our web server to your web browser, will be protected using encryption technology.

7.5 You acknowledge that the transmission of unencrypted (or inadequately encrypted) data over the internet is inherently insecure, and we cannot guarantee the security of data sent over the internet.

7.6 You should ensure that your password is not susceptible to being guessed, whether by a person or a computer program. You are responsible for keeping the password you use for accessing our website confidential and we will not ask you for your password (except when you log in to our website).

8. Your rights

8.1 In this Section 8, we have listed the rights that you have under data protection law.

8.2 Your principal rights under data protection law are:

(a) the right to access: you can ask for copies of your personal data;

(b) the right to rectification: you can ask us to rectify inaccurate personal data and to complete incomplete personal data;

(d) the right to restrict processing: you can ask us to restrict the processing of your personal data;

(e) the right to object to processing: you can object to the processing of your personal data, and where we process your personal data for direct marketing purposes or rely on our legitimate interests, including the outreach described in Sections 2.13 and 3.6, you have an absolute right to object to its use for direct marketing;

(f) the right to data portability: you can ask that we transfer your personal data to another organisation or to you;

(g) the right to complain to a supervisory authority: you can complain about our processing of your personal data; and

(h) the right to withdraw consent: to the extent that the legal basis of our processing of your personal data is consent, you can withdraw that consent.

8.3 These rights are subject to certain limitations and exceptions. You can learn more about the rights of data subjects by visiting https://edpb.europa.eu/our-work-tools/general-guidance/gdpr-guidelines-recommendations-best-practices_en and https://ico.org.uk/for-organisations/guide-to-data-protection/guide-to-the-general-data-protection-regulation-gdpr/individual-rights/.

8.4 You may exercise any of your rights in relation to your personal data by written notice to us, using the contact details set out below.

9. Third party websites

9.1 Our website includes hyperlinks to, and details of, third party websites.

9.2 In general we have no control over, and are not responsible for, the privacy policies and practices of third parties.

10. Updating information

10.1 Please let us know if the personal information that we hold about you needs to be corrected or updated.

11. About cookies

11.1 A cookie is a file containing an identifier (a string of letters and numbers) that is sent by a web server to a web browser and is stored by the browser. The identifier is then sent back to the server each time the browser requests a page from the server.

11.2 Cookies may be either persistent cookies or session cookies: a persistent cookie will be stored by a web browser and will remain valid until its set expiry date, unless deleted by the user before the expiry date; a session cookie, on the other hand, will expire at the end of the user session, when the web browser is closed.

11.3 Cookies may not contain any information that personally identifies a user, but personal data that we store about you may be linked to the information stored in and obtained from cookies.

12. Cookies that we use

12.1 We use cookies for the following purposes:

(a) authentication and status: we use cookies to identify you when you visit our website and as you navigate our website, and to help us determine if you are logged into our website;

(b) personalisation: we use cookies to store information about your preferences and to personalise our website for you;

(c) security: we use cookies as an element of the security measures used to protect user accounts, including preventing fraudulent use of login credentials, and to protect our website and services generally. These include cookies set by Cloudflare, our content delivery network and security provider: __cf_bm, which distinguishes automated traffic from human visitors, and cf_clearance, which is set only if you are shown a security challenge and records that you have passed it. Both are strictly necessary for the security of our website and are not used for tracking or advertising.

(d) analytics: on our journal websites we use a single first-party cookie, burst_uid, containing a random identifier, to distinguish returning visitors for aggregate readership statistics. It expires after 30 days, contains no personal information, and is not shared with any third party.

13. Analytics and service providers

13.1 Our service providers may use cookies, and those cookies may be stored on your computer when you visit our website. Apart from the first-party readership cookie described in Section 12.1(d), we do not use tracking cookies for general website analytics, and no third-party analytics services are used.

13.2 We use Cloudflare as our content delivery network and web application firewall, and to compile aggregate geographic statistics. As detailed in Section 2.9, all requests to our website pass through Cloudflare, which processes your IP address and request metadata to route traffic and to detect and block malicious requests, and logs those details where a request is flagged by our security rules. For geographic statistics we derive a 2-letter country code from your IP address using the Cloudflare CF-IPCountry header; those IP addresses are SHA-256 hashed with a site-specific salt before any caching, we do not store raw IP addresses in our own systems, and country data is automatically deleted after 13 months. No tracking cookies are set by this process beyond the strictly necessary security cookies described in Section 12.1(c).

13.3 We also use Cloudflare Turnstile on our website contact form to distinguish human visitors from automated traffic, as described in Section 2.14.

13.4 Our journal websites use a self-hosted analytics system to compile aggregate readership statistics; no data is shared with third-party analytics providers. The system records pageviews against the random identifier described in Section 12.1(d), together with approximate location — country and, where available, region — derived at Cloudflare’s edge from your IP address. The IP address itself is not stored in our systems, no precise location is collected, and geographic data is deleted after 13 months, as described in Section 13.2. Traffic is filtered for non-human activity in accordance with the COUNTER Code of Practice; see our usage-metrics policy for details of how readership is measured.

14. Managing cookies

14.1 Most browsers allow you to refuse to accept cookies and to delete cookies. The methods for doing so vary from browser to browser, and from version to version. You can however obtain up-to-date information about blocking and deleting cookies via these links:

(a) https://support.google.com/chrome/answer/95647 (Chrome);

(b) https://support.mozilla.org/en-US/kb/enhanced-tracking-protection-firefox-desktop (Firefox);

(d) https://support.microsoft.com/en-gb/help/17442/windows-internet-explorer-delete-manage-cookies (Internet Explorer);

(e) https://support.apple.com/en-gb/guide/safari/manage-cookies-and-website-data-sfri11471/mac (Safari); and

(f) https://support.microsoft.com/en-gb/help/4468242/microsoft-edge-browsing-data-and-privacy (Edge).

14.2 Blocking all cookies will have a negative impact upon the usability of many websites.

14.3 If you block cookies, you will not be able to use all the features on our website.

15. Amendments

15.1 We may update this policy from time to time by publishing a new version on our website.

15.2 You should check this page occasionally to ensure you are happy with any changes to this policy.

16. Our details

16.1 This website is owned and operated by Advances.In LTD.

16.2 We are registered in England and Wales under registration number 14114105, and our registered office is at 71-75 Shelton Street, Covent Garden, London, United Kingdom, WC2H 9JQ.

16.3 Our principal place of business is at 71-75 Shelton Street, Covent Garden, London, United Kingdom, WC2H 9JQ.

16.4 You can contact us:

(a) by post, to the postal address given above;

(b) using our website contact form; or

17. Data protection registration

17.1 We are registered as a data controller with the UK Information Commissioner’s Office.

17.2 Our data protection registration number is 01142659010D.

18. Data protection officer

18.1 Our data protection officer’s contact details are: Karolina Sowa, [email protected].