Privacy Statement

Last updated: 26 September 2026

1. Who we are

This website, asidejournals.com, is operated by PubPorta Publishing LLC, 16192 Coastal Highway, Lewes, Delaware 19958, USA ("we", "us"). PubPorta Publishing LLC publishes eleven ASIDE journals and is the data controller for the personal information described in this policy.

ASIDE Internal Medicine is published and owned by the American Society for Inclusion, Diversity, and Equity in Healthcare (ASIDE), a non-profit organisation at the same address. ASIDE is the data controller for personal information handled by that journal, and PubPorta Publishing LLC runs the platform on its behalf.

Questions or requests: contact@asidejournals.com.

2. What we collect and why

Information	Why we use it	Legal basis (EU/UK)
Account details: name, email, affiliation, country, ORCID iD, username, password (stored encrypted), roles and preferences	To run your account and let you submit, review or edit	Contract
Submissions: manuscripts, files, author details, declarations, correspondence	To assess, peer review, edit and publish your work	Contract; legitimate interests
Peer review records: reviews, recommendations, reviewer identities	To run double-anonymous peer review and keep a record of editorial decisions	Legitimate interests
Published metadata: author names, affiliations, ORCID iDs, corresponding-author email	Published with the article and shared with the indexing services in section 4	Contract; legitimate interests
Support messages you send us by email or through the site	To answer you	Legitimate interests
Usage data: pages viewed, device, browser, approximate location, referring site	To keep the site secure, count readership and improve the site (see section 5)	Legitimate interests; consent where required

We do not charge fees and do not collect payment card or bank details. We do not ask for sensitive information such as health, ethnicity or religion about you. If a manuscript contains patient information, authors must de-identify it and hold consent as set out in the author guidelines.

3. Information we obtain from public sources

To find peer reviewers and editorial board members, and to invite authors of relevant preprints to submit, we use publicly available professional information: names, affiliations, published email addresses and publication records from sources such as ORCID, Crossref, OpenAlex, PubMed and preprint servers. We use it only to send a professional invitation. You can ask us at any time to stop contacting you and we will record that request.

4. Who we share information with

• Readers and indexing services. Published articles and their metadata are public. Metadata is sent to Crossref (DOI registration) and made available to services such as DOAJ, Google Scholar, OpenAlex and the Internet Archive, and through our open OAI-PMH interface.
• Editors and reviewers see what they need for their role. Under double-anonymous review, authors and reviewers do not see each other's identities.
• Service providers who run parts of the site for us under contract: website hosting (Amazon Web Services, USA); content delivery and security (Cloudflare); email (Google Workspace); site analytics (Google Analytics, Microsoft Clarity; section 5); article metrics (PlumX Metrics by Elsevier, whose widget loads on article pages and receives your IP address and browser details); our support desk (hosted on our own server).
• Legal reasons. Where required by law, or to protect the integrity of the scholarly record (for example a publication-ethics investigation under COPE guidance).

We do not sell personal information, and we do not use your personal information to build advertising profiles.

5. Cookies and analytics

A cookie banner lets you accept or refuse non-essential cookies, and you can change your choice at any time from the "Cookie settings" link in the footer. Visitors in the EU, UK and Switzerland are asked before any analytics or advertising cookies are set. We honour the Global Privacy Control signal.

Category	What it does	Tools
Essential (always on)	Keeps you logged in, secures forms, remembers your cookie choice, protects the site from attack	OJS session cookie; support-desk cookie (only if you contact us); Cloudflare security cookies
Analytics (optional)	Tells us which pages are read and where the site is hard to use	Google Analytics 4; Microsoft Clarity (heatmaps and session recordings, with form fields, email addresses and numbers hidden; it is blocked on editorial, reviewing and submission pages)
Cookie-free statistics	Counts page views and downloads without cookies. IP addresses are shortened before storage and "Do Not Track" is honoured	Matomo, hosted on our own server
Marketing (optional)	Measures whether our free Google Ads Grants adverts lead to visits or submissions	Google Ads conversion measurement

6. How long we keep information

• Published articles and their metadata: permanently, as part of the scholarly record.
• Submissions and peer review records: for as long as the journal exists, including for manuscripts that are declined, so we can deal with integrity questions.
• Accounts: until you ask us to close yours. Your name remains on work you have published or reviewed.
• Support messages: attachments 90 days after upload; conversations 180 days after they are resolved.
• Analytics data: under each provider's retention settings; Clarity recordings are kept 30 days.

7. Your rights

Depending on where you live, you can ask to access, correct, delete, restrict or move your personal information, object to our use of it, or withdraw consent. You can update most account details yourself after logging in. For anything else, email contact@asidejournals.com. We reply within 30 days.

We cannot delete published articles or remove authors from them, because the scholarly record must stay complete; corrections follow our corrections and retractions policy. If you are in the EU or UK and are unhappy with our reply, you may complain to your local data protection authority. US residents can use the rights their state law gives them in the same way; we do not sell or "share" personal information for targeted advertising.

8. International transfers

Our servers are in the United States. If you use the site from elsewhere, your information is transferred to the United States. Where the law requires it, we rely on standard contractual clauses or the providers' certified transfer frameworks.

9. Security

We use encrypted connections, access controls and regular backups. No system is perfectly secure; if a breach affects you, we will tell you as the law requires.

10. Children

This site is for researchers and health professionals and is not directed at children under 16. We do not knowingly collect their information.

11. Changes

We will post any change on this page and update the date at the top. Significant changes will also be announced on the site.

12. Contact

PubPorta Publishing LLC, 16192 Coastal Highway, Lewes, Delaware 19958, USA
contact@asidejournals.com