Privacy policy

Who we are

OASIS Journals is published by OASIS Publishing Group (RC 1610588), No. 11 Banjul Street, Wuse 2, Abuja, Nigeria. We are responsible for the personal information described here. We handle it in line with the Nigeria Data Protection Act 2023 and, for people in the European Union or the United Kingdom, the GDPR.

What we collect

• Your account. Your title, name, email address, institution, country and password (stored only in scrambled form, which nobody can read back). Reviewer accounts also record the reviewer’s field.
• Manuscripts. The files you submit, the authors’ names and affiliations, the abstract and keywords, corrected versions, and messages about them.
• Reviews. Reviewers’ reports and recommendations.
• Payments. The amount, currency, date, Paystack’s reference, the payment status, and the IP address Paystack records for the payment. Card and bank details go to Paystack, never to us.
• Offers to review. What you enter on the offer to review form, including your CV.
• Help desk messages you send from your dashboard, with any files attached.
• The newsletter. Your email address, if you subscribe.
• Comments on articles. The name, email address and comment you enter. Only your name and comment are shown, after an editor approves them.
• Protection against abuse. To stop spam and password guessing, we briefly keep a record of form submissions and failed sign-ins tied to your IP address. Spam records hold the IP address only in scrambled form.

We count how many times each article’s PDF is downloaded, but the count is not linked to who downloaded it.

How we use it

• to run peer review and publishing: handling submissions, sending manuscripts to reviewers without the authors’ names, and making decisions;
• to publish accepted articles with their authors’ names and affiliations, and register them with Crossref;
• to send you emails about your account, your manuscripts, reviews and payments;
• to take and record payments;
• to consider offers to review;
• to send the newsletter, if you subscribed;
• to keep the site secure and stop abuse.

We use your information because you asked us to (for example by submitting a manuscript or subscribing), because we need it to provide the service, or to protect the site.

Cookies

We set one cookie: a session cookie that keeps you signed in and protects forms. It ends when you close your browser or sign out. The sign-in page also remembers, in your browser only, whether you last signed in as an author or a reviewer.

We don’t use advertising or analytics cookies. When you pay, Paystack’s payment window may set its own cookies, under Paystack’s privacy policy.

Confidentiality of manuscripts and reviews

Unpublished manuscripts, reviewers’ reports and messages with the editors are confidential. Reviewers don’t see authors’ names, and authors don’t see reviewers’ names. Authors’ and reviewers’ contact details are never shown publicly; once an article is published, its authors’ names and affiliations are.

Who we share it with

We never sell, rent or trade personal information. We share it only with:

• Paystack, which processes payments;
• Crossref, which receives each published article’s title, authors’ names and affiliations to register its DOI;
• our web host, which stores the site, its database and our email;
• Cloudflare, Google Fonts and jsDelivr, which serve some of the site’s icons, fonts and styles, and so receive your IP address when those pages load;
• reviewers and editors, who see manuscripts as described above;
• authorities, when the law requires it, or an author’s institution when the editors investigate misconduct (see the publication ethics policy).

Published articles, with their authors’ names and affiliations, are public, and are read and indexed by others, such as search engines.

How long we keep it

• Accounts: while the account is in use, or until you ask us to delete it.
• Published articles: permanently, as part of the scholarly record.
• Manuscripts not published, reviews and payment records: as long as we need them for the journals’ records and our accounts.
• Offers to review and CVs: while the editors consider the offer. The editors can delete a declined offer with its CV, and will delete yours if you ask.
• Newsletter: until you ask to stop receiving it.
• Spam and sign-in records: used for an hour at most.

Keeping it safe

The site is served only over an encrypted connection (HTTPS). Passwords are stored in scrambled form. Unpublished manuscripts and CVs can’t be opened by a direct web address: only the authors, reviewers and editors entitled to them can open them. Only signed-in staff can reach the admin area.

Your rights

You can ask us to:

• give you a copy of the personal information we hold about you;
• correct it (you can also update your profile from your dashboard);
• delete it, except published articles, which stay part of the scholarly record;
• stop using it for something, such as the newsletter.

Email support@oasisjournals.org. If you’re not satisfied with our answer, you can complain to the Nigeria Data Protection Commission, or to the data protection authority where you live.

Contact

OASIS Publishing Group, No. 11 Banjul Street, Wuse 2, Abuja, Nigeria
Email: support@oasisjournals.org
Phone: +234 703 635 6635, +44 747 454 5439

When this policy changes, the date at the top changes too.