Privacy policy

Who we are

PeerRef is a journal-independent peer review service. Using AI and open-source software, we organises peer review, at request, for researchers that have authored preprints. We provide researchers review reports, from expert researchers, to improve and verify their work.

Information you give us

When you submit information to this website via webform, we collect the data requested in the webform in order to track and respond to your submissions. We share this information with Squarespace, our online store hosting provider, so that they can provide website services to us. We also share this information with Google Drive for storage.

Information collected from publications, conference activities and other public sources

We collect publicly available information about researchers from publications, preprint servers, articles, and conferences. We only collect information relevant to professional research activities, such as name, institutional affiliation, contact details, publications, and field of research. We do this with legitimate interest to run, grow and develop our organization and provide researchers with a high-quality service, such as identifying the most suited expert reviewers for preprints, or to contact researchers about receiving peer review for their unverified preprint. Researchers that do not wish to be contacted by PeerRef, can email us at elliott@peerref.com.

Disclosure to Third Parties

If you request peer review for a preprint with PeerRef, we will send a the title and link to the preprint to potential external reviewers to gauge their interest in reviewing your preprint. If your Preprint is reviewed or you review a preprint, we share information about you, the preprint and the review reports with third parties such as publishers, preprint servers and article curation services.

We will not sell or lease your personal information to any third party.

How long we retain information

We retain personal data for no longer than reasonably necessary for the purpose for which it was collected.

Analytics

This website collects personal data to power our site analytics, including:

  • Information about your browser, network, and device

  • Web pages you visited prior to coming to this website

  • Your IP address

This information may also include details about your use of this website, including:

  • Clicks

  • Internal links

  • Pages visited

  • Timestamps

We share this information with Google Analytics and Squarespace, our website analytics provider, to learn about site traffic and activity.

We use Hotjar in order to better understand our users’ needs and to optimize this service and experience. Hotjar is a technology service that helps us better understand our users’ experience (e.g. how much time they spend on which pages, which links they choose to click, what users do and don’t like, etc.) and this enables us to build and maintain our service with user feedback. Hotjar uses cookies and other technologies to collect data on our users’ behavior and their devices. This includes a device's IP address (processed during your session and stored in a de-identified form), device screen size, device type (unique device identifiers), browser information, geographic location (country only), and the preferred language used to display our website. Hotjar stores this information on our behalf in a pseudonymized user profile. Hotjar is contractually forbidden to sell any of the data collected on our behalf.

Cookies

This website uses cookies and similar technologies, which are small files or pieces of text that download to a device when a visitor accesses a website or app. For information about viewing the cookies dropped on your device, visit The cookies Squarespace uses.

  • These analytics and performance cookies are used on this website, only when you acknowledge our cookie banner. This website uses analytics and performance cookies to view site traffic, activity, and other data.

Your rights

  • You may request a copy of any personal data PeerRef holds about you, and request to have any incorrect data corrected.

  • You may object to us processing your data.

  • You may ask us to erase your data. In certain circumstances, we may consider we have an overriding need to retain all or some information to continue to provide our services as an open peer review provider.

  • Withdraw the consent for the processing of your Personal Data which is based on your consent.