If you are an Author or Reviewer:

We collect certain information about you (and any contributing authors) when you submit or review a manuscript (e.g. your name, postal address, email/social media address, telephone number, job title, qualifications, photograph, areas of scientific interest, log-in details, payment information, and any personal data contained in the content of your manuscript/comments and contained in any further correspondence in relation to our publications.) We use this information in order to publish scientific papers and associated peer review history files in our journals, for the purposes of raising awareness about scientific/newsworthy issues, to promote The Company and its work, and (subject to any necessary consents) to market our products and services. In addition, we are now asking authors and reviewers for their gender identity, as part of our diversity and inclusion efforts. This information is provided on a voluntary basis, will be visible only to internal staff (excluding academic editors) and will have no impact on any editorial decisions.

Where authors give consent for the peer review history file to be published alongside an article, and where the reviewer has chosen to identify themselves to the author by signing their report, the reviewer’s personal data (name and institution), as provided, shall be published in connection with the ‘peer review history’ file.

Manuscript transfer network
Where authors request transfer of a manuscript and provide consent to such transfer, we will share the personal data of the author and that of any contributing authors (name, institution address, email address, ORCiD iD) with our known publisher partners within the manuscript transfer network.

Where authors request transfer of a manuscript and reviewers provide consent for disclosure of their identity to the journal Editors, we will share the reviewer’s personal data (name, institute, email address) with our known publisher partners within the manuscript transfer network. Reviewers who have not provided such consent will remain anonymous to the journal Editors, and their personal data will not then be transferred to publisher partners within the manuscript transfer network. Reviewers remain anonymous to the authors and to the other reviewers unless they have chosen to identify themselves to the author and sign their report.

For more details of our publisher partners and our publisher partners’ privacy policies, see our manuscript transfer information page.

Please do not send us the personal data of other people without first asking those other people to confirm to us that they consent to the sharing of their personal data in this way and that we may use it in connection with the above purposes.

We may contact you to ask you to write articles or review articles in the future, to provide you with service updates of our processes and policies, and we may contact you in the event of any ethical questions relating to articles.

Our lawful basis for holding and using this personal data is the legitimate interests of The Company as a not-for-profit publishing organisation dedicated to supporting and inspiring the biological community and (as applicable) in order to perform contractual obligations owed to you or to take steps at your request prior to entering into a contract.

Once a paper is published, it will be archived indefinitely and we may retain documentation relating to authorship indefinitely.

We share personal data connected with publications with the following parties:

• editors and reviewers who operate within and outside the EEA;
• our design and typesetting service providers who operates in the UK, USA and India;
• our manuscript submission and tracking service provider who operates in the UK and USA;
• service providers that provide a pre-print server operating in the US, but only where an author chooses to publish on that server;
• service providers who perform editorial services who operate within and outside the EEA;
• service providers that provide email management services within and outside the EEA; and
• publisher partners within our manuscript transfer network outside the EEA; and
• search engine providers who provide journal search services and as part of this, the search engine provider may use AI to optimise the searchability.