When you register as a researcher, editor, or reviewer, we collect information through our authentication provider, Clerk: your name and email address, an encrypted password we never see in plaintext, your institutional affiliation if you provide it, and any profile information you choose to add.

Manuscripts, revisions, and their metadata — titles, abstracts, author lists, and field of study — are stored along with the peer review comments, editorial decisions, and status history attached to them. Files are stored securely and are not publicly accessible except where you choose to publish.

Donations are processed through Stripe. We do not store your full credit card number, CVV, or bank details on our servers — Stripe handles payment processing under its own privacy policy and PCI-DSS compliance standards. We retain only the donation amount and date, and the donor's name and email if provided, for receipt purposes.

We use Amazon SES to send transactional emails — submission confirmations, review status updates, and editorial decisions. We do not use your email address for unsolicited marketing.

We collect basic usage data — pages visited, browser type, and a general location derived from IP address — for security and platform improvement. We do not use third-party advertising trackers or sell data to advertisers.

We use the information we collect to operate the peer review and publishing pipeline, communicate with you about submissions, reviews, and account status, process donations and issue receipts, assign DOIs and maintain the public article record, maintain platform security and prevent abuse, and comply with legal obligations.

We do not sell your personal information. We share it only with the service providers who help operate the Platform — Clerk for authentication, Stripe for payments, and Amazon Web Services for hosting, storage, and email — each bound by their own privacy and security obligations; as published content, since an article's title, author names, abstract, and DOI become part of the public scholarly record once it is published; and where required by law, subpoena, or to protect the rights and safety of IJARC or others.

We retain account and submission data for as long as your account is active or as needed to maintain the scholarly record. Published articles and their metadata are retained indefinitely as part of the permanent academic record. You may request deletion of unpublished personal account data by contacting us.

We use industry-standard safeguards, including encrypted connections, access-controlled cloud infrastructure on AWS, and least-privilege credential management. No system is completely secure, and we cannot guarantee absolute security.

Depending on your location, you may have the right to access the personal data we hold about you, request correction or deletion of it, object to or restrict certain processing, and request a copy of your data in a portable format.

To exercise these rights, use the contact address to the left.

The Platform is intended for researchers, reviewers, and academic professionals and is not directed at children under 16. We do not knowingly collect information from children.

We may update this Privacy Policy from time to time. Material changes will be noted with a revised effective date in the eyebrow at the top of this page.