This is the privacy policy of The Center for Scientific Integrity, the nonprofit home of Retraction Watch, the Retraction Watch Database, and the Medical Evidence Project, along with other projects. The Center for Scientific Integrity is a 501(c)(3) nonprofit corporation headquartered in New York City. Our contact information is available here.
We recognize that privacy of your personal information is important. This document provides information on what types of information we may receive, collect, store, and use. Please note that this policy may change without notice.
Information we collect:
The only personal information the Center for Scientific Integrity deliberately collects about you is information you provide voluntarily by engaging with us. For example, to register for the Retraction Watch email newsletters or comment on posts at Retraction Watch, you must provide contact details (name and email address), and we collect that information. When you comment on a post at Retraction Watch, our site also collects those comments.
We do not sell your personal information to third parties. We do share aggregated, de-identified information about site traffic with selected partners and funders, and we may use your provided information in our fundraising and information-sharing efforts.
Protecting anonymous sources:
When you provide information to our journalistic endeavors and you wish to remain publicly anonymous as the source for that information, we will treat your information (including email and IP addresses) as confidential in terms of attributed sourcing.
We have very limited control over how third-party service providers use your information.
Newsletters for Retraction Watch are run through third-party service providers including MailChimp and Substack. The websites for The Center for Scientific Integrity, Retraction Watch, and the Medical Evidence Project run on the WordPress platform. When we collect donations online, we do so through providers such as (but not limited to) Square and PayPal. You should be aware that these providers have their own privacy policies that we do not control. You can access their privacy policies at their websites. (We are not providing links because their policies, including the location of them, may change frequently.)
Our third-party service providers may collect your IP address and may also connect known information about you. For example, when visitors leave comments on the Retraction Watch site, WordPress collects the visitor’s IP address and browser user agent string to help spam detection. An anonymized string created from your email address (also called a hash) may be provided to the Gravatar service to see if you are using it. After approval of your comment, your profile picture may become visible to the public in the context of your comment. This is an example of how your personal information may be used in an automated fashion by our service providers. Please be aware of this potential.
If you chose to post comments at Retraction Watch’s site, please also be aware that, if you upload images in conjunction with a comment, you should avoid uploading images with embedded location data (EXIF GPS) included. Visitors to our websites can download and extract any location data from images on the website.
Cookies will typically be generated when you visit our sites:
Depending on how you set your browser, you may leave cookies at our websites when you visit them. The general purpose of the cookies is to make the websites perform better for you, the user. But, again, we use third-party providers for our websites and we cannot control their use of cookies. You can manage your cookie preferences in your browser settings.
Embedded material:
Material on our websites may include embedded content (e.g. videos, images, articles, etc.). Embedded content from other websites behaves in the exact same way as if the visitor has visited the other website. These websites may collect data about you, use cookies, embed additional third-party tracking, and monitor your interaction with that embedded content, including tracking your interaction with the embedded content if you have an account and are logged in to that website.
What rights you have over your data:
You can request to receive an exported file of the personal data we hold about you (name, user name, email address, etc.), including any data you have provided to us. You can also request that we erase any personal data we hold about you. This does not include any data we are obliged to keep for administrative, legal, or security purposes.