INTRODUCTION AND DEFINITIONS
Pluto Labs, Inc. ("Pluto Labs, Inc.", "we", "us", "our", "ours", "ourselves") has begun on the belief that global research ecosystem in pursuit of advancing human knowledge works better when it is collaborative rather than competitive. As an endeavor to build a system to actually realize such belief we are developing and operating online services including https://www.scinapse.io/ ("the Services"), as described in our Terms of Service, to support researchers, where they will gather up, interact each other, and evolve into the community that will bring life to the designated system. It is necessary for us to collect, share, and analyze information about the users to improve the Services and serve the community better.
We believe that it is important to protect personal information of users, not only because it is a legal and moral obligation and observing it is critical for the being of the Services, but also because participants need to feel safe and respected to work collectively with others. Dealing with information in a user-friendly and protective way necessarily comes with transparency. Use of any information from the Services will be solely for the purpose of serving its vision: breaking down barriers in academia. That is, we will be using information only to make the Services work better for you, the researchers, and to enable a better environment for researchers to pursue genuine knowledge.
This Privacy Policy ("this Privacy Policy") explains types of information we collect from you, how we collect them, and how we use them. It is important to understand that by using any or all of the Services you consent to the collection, transfer, processing, storage, disclosure, and use of your information as described in this Privacy Policy. We therefore ask you please read this Privacy Policy carefully for the protection of users like yourself, the Services, and us. If you do not consent to this Privacy Policy, you may not access or use the Services.
You understand that you may be governed under the laws and legislation of any or all of the regions (i) where you live, (ii) where you view or edit content on our services, (iii) where other users view your content, or (iv) where other users who view your content live, which may include the law in the Republic of Korea where we are based ("applicable law").
Whenever this Privacy Policy says you ("you", "your", "yours", "yourself"), it means you, individual or group, regardless of whether you are using the Services on behalf of yourself or someone else. Contributions ("contributions") mean content you add or changes you make to the Services or such actions of adding or changing.
Personal information ("personal information") is information that either you provide us or we collect from you, that could be used to uniquely identify you as a person. Specifically, to the extent that it doesn't conflict with applicable law, we regard at least the following as personal information if it is otherwise nonpublic and can be used to uniquely identify you:
(a) Any combination of following items that would constitute a unique identification of yourself as a person in the real world: your real name, address of residence, phone number, email address, password, identification number issued by your government, identification number issued by your affiliated organization along with the name of the organization, Internet Protocol (IP) address, user-agent information, credit card number; and
(b) when associated with personal information that falls into the description of subsection (a), any sensitive data such as date of birth, gender, sexual orientation, racial or ethnic origins, marital or familial status, medical conditions or disabilities, political affiliation, and religion; and
The Services also involve transmission of information between us and some third parties ("third party", "third parties"), which are individuals, entities, websites, services, products, and applications that are not controlled, managed, or operated by Pluto Labs, Inc. This includes the cloud-based digital infrastructures that enable the Services.
COVERAGE
Except for several cases explicitly explained below, this Privacy Policy applies to our collection and handling of information about you that we receive as a result of your use of any or all of the Services. This Privacy Policy also applies to information that we receive from third parties. This may include our blogs, APIs, web trackers, and digital communications services such as emails and mobile messages.
There are, however, certain situations which this Privacy Policy does not cover.
Third-parties
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Third party services such as blogs, email, survey forms often operate with their own policies. In such case, this Privacy Policy does not cover information handling in such services.
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The Services involve transmission of information between us and third parties. Once information is transmitted from third parties to us, this Privacy Policy covers such information. This Privacy Policy also covers the way information is shared from us to third parties. However, this Privacy Policy does not cover the handling of such information once they are under control of third parties, regardless of whether they are shared from us, received from you, or collected by such third parties.
Users
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The Services heavily rely on user contributions. It may happen that some user contributions contain nonpublic information or personal information, and this Privacy Policy may cover while the contributions pass through the Services and their underlying systems.
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However, the users who receive such information and what they do with such information once they receive them are not covered by this Privacy Policy. We cannot control the actions of other users with whom you may choose to share your information. Therefore, we cannot and do not guarantee that your information will not be viewed by unauthorized persons. You understand that when you use public areas of the Services, your information will be available to other users and in some cases may be publicly available. We recommend you be cautious about giving out personal information to others or sharing personal information in public areas, whether designated as public or private. We are not responsible for the personal information you choose to share in these public areas or for the actions of any third parties with whom you share personal information.
Alternative Policy
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Parts of the Services may have separate policies. There will be links to such alternative policies on web pages or tools specific to those parts of the services. This Privacy Policy does not cover in such situations.
TYPES & METHODS OF INFORMATION COLLECTION
Public Contributions
Several features on the Services rely on your contributions such as comments, discussions, or evaluation. Whenever you make contributions on the Services, you should assume that information you actively contribute to the Services is publicly available, regardless of that information being personal or not, and we may use your public contributions, either aggregated with those by others or individually, to operate and improve the Services. If you believe you have included personal information within your contributions and it should be deleted, please contact team@pluto.im immediately.
Registration and Verification
Some parts of the Services may require you to register with an account and provide your personal information to verify your identity as a researcher. This may include your real name, your affiliated organization, email address, or your account information from third party services. To ensure that users behave in the Services with integrity and good faith for academia, certain information may be publicly available along with your contributions. For example, when you make comments, evaluations, or peer reviews on the works by others, your name and affiliation may be disclosed with them.
Parts of the Services may also provide multiple options to sign in via third party services such as Google, Facebook, Twitter, ORCID, and etc. As part of the sign-in process we collect and store following data.
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Any forms of names that are used in each third party services including full names, first names, last names, usernames, display names, and etc.
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Any forms of email addresses that are provided by the third party
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Authentication tokens issued by the third party
User Input - information you provide to us
The types of personal and non-personal information that we collect directly from you depends on the content and features of the Services you use and how you otherwise interact with us and may include:
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Contact details, such as your name, email address, postal address, phone number and social media handle;
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Account login credentials, such as usernames and passwords, password hints and similar security information;
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Other account registration and profile information, including educational, professional and other background information, such as your field of study, current position, practice area and areas of interests, and photo;
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Information that you communicate to us, such as questions or information you send to team@pluto.im;
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Data that you provide to us as part of interacting with the Service, such as your saved papers, email alerts, favorites and search queries; and/or
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Communications preferences, such as your preferred language and the frequency, type and format of the alerts you sign up to receive.
Academic Information
Some information in the Services may be disclosed, and not be deleted, when it is believed to be important for academic and research purpose. Research communications heavily depend on publications, and information relevant to publications is in general important for the Services, users, and their studies. Among various pieces of personal information relevant to a publication record, we believe, to the extent permitted by applicable law and the correspondent license under which the record is shared, at least the real names of authors, their affiliations, and their bibliographic metrics such as h-index and received citations are academic information.
We collect author names as publicly accessible metadata from the web, publishers and other sources for display across our website including in association with papers, presentations, blog posts, code repositories, videos and citations/references. This data and content is stored indefinitely. We use the author name from this publicly accessible metadata to auto-generate author profile pages where we display content associated with an author, compute citation statistics and display links to other authors. Author profile pages can be updated by using the “Suggest Changes” button on an author’s profile page to add/remove papers, add an affiliation, add a link to a homepage, add an email address, and add other information that is relevant to the author. Requesters who submit changes are required to provide their first and last name, email address and justification which we store in a database to validate the request. Suggested changes may not be applied to our databases and the Services if the request is deemed invalid.
Third Party Sources
We also may obtain contact details and other information about you from third parties including (1) third party companies or individuals that help us process information and support the Services; and (2) publicly-available sources and data suppliers from which we obtain data to validate or supplement the information we hold.
This data from third party may be combined with other information we collect and might include aggregate level data, such as which IP address correspond to zip codes or countries.
Usage Information
Operating and improving the Services requires a deep understanding of how users behave and utilize the Services. Just as typical other internet services would do, we may automatically receive some information when you use the Services with a web browser. This includes, but is not limited to:
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Internet Protocol address;
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type of your device and its unique identifier (if any);
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type, version, and language preference of your web browser;
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type, version, and language preference of your operating system;
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name of your internet service provider;
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the website that referred you to the Services; and
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the details of your request to the Services, such as date, time, or queries.
We also utilize several popular technologies and services to collect your usage information. This ranges from prevalent web technologies like cookies and web storage to third party services such as trackers.
USE OF INFORMATION
We and our third party services providers use your information for the purpose of pursuing our mission and vision. To be specific, this includes:
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responding to your requests with regard to the Services;
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operating, administering, and improving the Services;
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providing customized features of the Services;
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facilitating communication between users and us;
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complying to legal obligations and our Terms, resolving disputes; and
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analyzing in aggregate level for statistical and scientific purposes.
SHARING INFORMATION
While we consider it important to protect your information, we may share information with third parties.
Legal Reasons
We will access, use, preserve, and/or disclose your personal information if we reasonably believe it necessary to satisfy a valid and legally enforceable warrant, subpoena, court order, law or regulation, or other judicial or administrative order. However, if we believe that a particular request for disclosure of a user's information is legally invalid or an abuse of the legal system and the affected user does not intend to oppose the disclosure themselves, we will try our best to fight it. We are committed to notifying you of such request when possible, before we disclose your personal information in response to a legal demand. However, we may only provide notice if we are not legally restrained from contacting you, there is no credible threat to life or limb that is created or increased by disclosing the request, and you have provided us with any valid online contact point (possibly email or phone number).
Nothing in this Privacy Policy is intended to limit any legal objections or defenses you may have to a third party's request (whether it be civil, criminal, or governmental) to disclose your information. We recommend seeking the advice of legal counsel immediately if such a request is made involving you.
Protection of Users, Ourselves, and the Services
We may need to share your Personal Information if it is reasonably believed to be necessary to enforce or investigate potential violations of our Terms of Service, this Privacy Policy, or any individual protocol of the Services. We may also need to access and share information to investigate and defend ourselves against legal threats or actions.
We hope that this never comes up, but we may disclose your personal information if we believe that it's reasonably necessary to prevent imminent and serious bodily harm or death to a person, or to protect our organization, employees, contractors, users, or the public. We may also disclose your personal information if we reasonably believe it necessary to detect, prevent, or otherwise assess and address potential spam, malware, fraud, abuse, unlawful activity, and security or technical concerns.
Third party services
We use third party services providers or contractors who help run or improve the Services for you and other users. We give access to your personal information to these providers or contractors as needed to perform their services for us or to use their tools and services. We hope these service providers treat your information consistently with, and no less protective of your privacy than, the principles of this Privacy Policy, but once the information is shared and under control of third parties, their policies and terms will govern the handling of such information.
Research, Development & Improvement
Improving the Services and pursuing the mission and vision of Pluto Labs, Inc. might require analytic services by third parties. We may share non-personal information or aggregated information with researchers, scholars, academics, and other interested third parties who wish to study the Services. Sharing this information helps them understand usage, viewing, and demographics statistics and patterns. They then can share their findings with us and our users so that we can all better understand and improve the Services.
When we give access to personal information to third parties, we hope they treat your information consistently with, and no less protective of your privacy than, the principles of this Privacy Policy. However, we cannot guarantee that they will abide by our agreement, nor do we guarantee that we will regularly screen or audit their projects.
Public contribution
Any information you post publicly on the Services is just that – public. For example, if you put your mailing address on one of your comments, that is public, and not protected by this Privacy Policy. Please think carefully before you make public contributions on the Services, and please try to respect the rights of others and not to infringe any copyright.
Your Explicit Permission
In some situations other than explicitly expressed in this Privacy Policy above, when we need to share your information with third parties we only do so with your permission.
PROTECTION
We use various measures to protect information from unauthorized access. These include cryptography, access control, and firewalls. Unfortunately, there's no such thing as completely secure data transmission or storage, so we can't guarantee that our security will not be breached.
Although we might provide features like temporary password or password resetting, we never ask passwords from users. For your own protection, please be responsible of safeguarding your own password, and never disclose it to anyone.
If you are asked your password or you find any sign of your personal information being misused due to security breach, please let us know by sending us email at team@pluto.im, so we can fight against malicious attempts and better protect users and ourselves.
RETENTION PERIOD
We keep your information for as long as necessary to provide the Services and as consistent with the purposes and uses outlined in this Privacy Policy. Non-personal information and public contributions may be retained indefinitely. If you have any concern with information on the Services, please contact team@pluto.im.
For the protection of ourselves, the Services, and other users, you may not use the Services if you do not agree with this Privacy Policy.
This Privacy Policy is written in English. In the event of any differences in meaning or interpretation between the original English version of this Privacy Policy and a translated version, if any, the original English version precedes.
Pluto Labs, Inc. is a non-profit team based in Seoul, Republic of Korea (South Korea), with servers and data centers, including those operated by third parties, located in various places around the world. If you decide to use the Services, you understand that your personal information will be collected, transferred, stored, processed, disclosed and otherwise used in the Republic of Korea as described in this Privacy Policy. You also understand that your information may be transferred by us from Republic of Korea to other countries, where data protection laws may be different or less stringent than that of your country, in connection with providing the Services to you.
Do-Not-Track signals
Pluto currently heavily depends on third party trackers such as Google Analytics. Not allowing such tracking of user behaviors might lay a huge challenge for us in improving the Services and delivering them to users. We ask you, if you will, allow the tracking functions in your browser for our Websites and the Services, and we promise that we won't use your information for marketing purposes and that we will use it in alignment with this Privacy Policy while protecting your personal information.
For clarity, we deal with your request the same, either with or without Do-Not-Track signals.
Changes to this Privacy Policy
To ensure that this Privacy Policy reflects the dynamic changes of this fast moving world, we may need to modify this Privacy Policy from time to time. We reserve the right to modify this Privacy Policy, with or without prior notice, partial or complete.
We will try to notice you when there is going to be substantial changes to this Privacy Policy. If you have provided us with your email address by signing up to the Services, we will let you know in advance about the change via email. Otherwise, the details of the changes will be announced on our Websites, the Services, and our social channels such as blogs, mailing lists, and social media.
Your continued use of the Services after this Privacy Policy becomes effective constitutes your agreement to this Privacy Policy, whether you have noticed changes to this Privacy Policy or not. Thus, we ask you please always review the most recent version of this Privacy Policy.
Contact
For questions, concerns, suggestions, or any inquiries relating to this Privacy Policy or to any information under this Privacy Policy, please email us at team@pluto.im.
Our (snail) mailing address is 419, Teheran-ro, Gangnam-gu, Seoul, 06160, Republic of Korea
Thank you
Thank you for reading through this Privacy Policy, and joining the great march on innovating global academia. Please enjoy using the Services, and we appreciate your participation in shaping the knowledge of humanity.