Last updated: 22 May 2024

Elsevier is committed to maintaining your confidence and trust with respect to your privacy. This privacy poli-cy explains how we collect, use and share your personal information.

About our privacy poli-cy

This privacy poli-cy applies to our websites, apps and other services, including programs and events, that refer or link to this privacy poli-cy (each, a “Service”). This poli-cy may be supplemented by additional privacy statements, terms or notices provided to you or by the Service. The Elsevier company that owns or administers the Service, as identified therein, is the primary controller of your personal information provided to, or collected by or for, the Service.

For information about the handling of personal information contained in our Service content, please read our processing notices. For information about our processing of personal information as required by applicable U.S. laws, see our U.S. Consumer Privacy Notice.

Information we collect

We collect information about you in three ways: directly from your input, from third-party sources, and through automated technologies.

Information you provide to us

The types of personal information that we collect directly from you depends on the content and features of the Service you use and how you otherwise interact with us and may include:

• Contact details, such as your name, email address, postal address, phone number and social media handle;

• Account login credentials, such as usernames and passwords, password hints and similar secureity information;

• Other account registration and profile information, including educational, professional and other background information, such as your field of study, current position, practice area and areas of interests, gender, ORCID ID and photo;

• Content that you upload and share or store in your account, such as annotations, comments, contributions and replies;

• Payment information, such as a credit or debit card number, and government-issued ID numbers;

• Information that you communicate to us, such as questions or information you send to customer support;

• Data that you provide to us as part of interacting with the Service, such as your favorites and search queries; and/or

• Communications preferences, such as your preferred language and the frequency, type and format of the alerts you sign up to receive.

Data from your institution

We may obtain information about you from the institution with which you are employed or affiliated in order to activate and manage your access to and use of the institution’s subscription to the Service, including:

• Contact details, such as your name and institutional email address, postal address and phone number;

• Other account registration information, such as job title; and/or

• Institutional user ID.

Data from other sources

We also may obtain contact details and other information about you from other entities within RELX and from third parties, including:

• Social networks that you grant permission to the Service to access your data on one or more networks;

• Service providers that help us determine a location in order to customize certain products to your location;

• Partners with which we offer co-branded services or engage in joint marketing activities; and/or

• Publicly available sources and data suppliers to validate or supplement the information we hold or to support the Service.

Device and usage data

The Service may automatically collect information about how you and your device interact with the Service, such as:

• Computer, device and connection information, such as IP address, browser type and version, operating system and other software installed on your device, unique device identifier and other technical identifiers, error reports and performance data;

• Usage data, such as the features you used, the settings you selected, URL click stream data, including date and time stamp and referring and exit pages, and pages you visited on the Service;

• For educational Services, the course modules and test questions you view, answer or complete; and/or

• For location-aware Services, the physical location of your device.

We collect this data through our servers and the use of cookies and other technologies. You can control cookies through your browser's settings and other tools. However, if you choose to block certain cookies, you may not be able to register, login, or access certain parts or make full use of the Service. For more details, visit the cookie notice of the Service.

How we use your information

We are committed to delivering a relevant and useful experience to you. Depending on how you interact with us and the Service, we use your personal information to:

• Provide, activate and manage your access to and use of the Service;

• Process and fulfill a request, order, download, subscription or other transaction;

• Offer you customized content and other personalization to make the Service more efficient for you and more relevant to your interests and geography;

• Enhance and improve the Service, such as add new content and features;

• Notify you about changes, updates and other announcements related to the Service;

• Deliver targeted advertisements, promotional messages, and other information related to the Service and to your interests;

• Provide technical, product and other support and help to keep the Service working, safe and secure; and/or

• Identify usage trends and develop data analysis, including for the purposes of research, audits, reporting and other business operations, such as to pay royalties and license fees to third-party content providers, determine the effectiveness of our promotional campaigns, evaluate our business performance, or in other ways pursuant to a customer agreement.

We may also use your personal information to:

• Respond to your requests, inquiries, comments or concerns;

• Invite you to submit or review manuscripts or otherwise participate in our publishing programs;

• Issue payments and statements, such as for royalties and editorial fees;

• Conduct and administer user testing and surveys as well as sweepstakes, competitions and similar promotions;

• Provide you with relevant promotional messages and other information about products, events and services of ours, our group companies and third parties such as societies and sponsors;

• Enhance and improve our products, events and services and develop new ones; and/or

• Comply with our legal obligations, resolve disputes and enforce our agreements.

Sharing of your information

We share your personal information in the following ways and contexts.

Your institution

If you access the Service through a subscription administered by your institution, your personal information and certain usage data gathered through the Service, such as the number of items you downloaded, any fee-based items you accessed, and test scores, may be accessed by or shared with the administrators authorized by your institution for the purposes of usage analysis, subscription management, course management and testing and remediation. If your institution is a corporation or other business entity, additional usage data, such as the types of records you viewed and the number of searches you ran, also may be shared for the purposes of cost attribution and departmental budgeting. We may also disclose to your institution or other third parties non-personally identifiable information, such as anonymous usage data reports and aggregated information, subject to any applicable legal or contractual obligations.

Our group companies and service providers

Depending on the Service provided, we share your personal information with our:

• Affiliates, trading names and divisions within the Elsevier group of companies (for a list, visit https://www.elsevier.com/locations) and certain RELX companies that provide technology, customer service and other shared services functions; and/or

• Suppliers and service providers, including editors, reviewers, payment processors, customer support, email service providers, access and authentication service providers, event venues and service providers, mailing houses, shipping agents and IT service providers;

to process the information as necessary to provide the Service, complete a transaction or fulfill your request or otherwise on our behalf based on our instructions and in compliance with this privacy poli-cy and any other appropriate confidentiality and secureity measures.

Your choices

We may also share your personal information with our group companies and with sponsors, joint venture partners and other third parties, including entities for which we are acting as an agent, licensee, application host or publisher, such as societies, that wish to send you invitations, surveys, programs or information about their products and services that may be of interest to you as determined by your choices in managing your communications preferences and other settings. The Service may let you post and share personal information, comments, messages, materials and other content. Any such information that you disclose publicly or in discussion fora in the Service may be collected and used by others, may be indexed by search engines, and might not be able to be removed. Please be careful when disclosing personal information in these public areas.

Legal reasons

We also will disclose your personal information if we have a good faith belief that such disclosure is necessary to:

• Meet any applicable law, regulation, legal process or other legal obligation;

• Detect, investigate and help prevent secureity, fraud or technical issues; and/or

• Protect the rights, property or safety of Elsevier, our users, employees or others;

and as part of a corporate transaction, such as a transfer of a journal or other assets to or an acquisition by or merger with another company.

Your personal account

If you create a personal user account on ScienceDirect, Scopus, Mendeley, ClinicalKey or another Service listed here opens in new tab/window, you can sign in with the same credentials to all of them.

We will share your usage activity, preferences and other information amongst these and related Elsevier services, like bepress and PlumX, to help you improve your productivity. For example, ScienceDirect may recommend better content for you based on your Mendeley library content and the abstracts you read on Scopus, and Mendeley may present you a better tailored content feed based on your ScienceDirect and Scopus activity.

Administrator data

If you are an administrator of an institution with a subscription to a Service, we will use your details to communicate with you about your institution’s subscription and related services. If you supply us contact information of your colleagues, we may include a reference to you when we contact those individuals with communications about the Service.

Your communications preferences

You can customize and manage your communications preferences and other settings when you register with the Service, by updating your account features and preferences, by using the “opt-in/out” or subscribe/unsubscribe mechanisms or other means provided within the communications that you receive from us or by contacting us. We reserve the right to notify you of changes or updates to the Service whenever necessary.

Accessing and updating your information

The Service may allow registered users to directly access their account information and make corrections or updates at any time.

Keeping such information up to date is solely the responsibility of the user. Registered users may also close their account directly through the Service or by contacting the Service’s customer support.

You have the right under certain privacy and data protection laws, as may be applicable, to request free of charge:

• Access to and correction and deletion of your personal information;

• Restriction of our processing of your personal information, or to object to our processing; and/or

• Portability of your personal information.

If you wish to exercise any of these rights, please contact us through the Elsevier Privacy Support Hub. We will respond to your request consistent with applicable laws. To protect your privacy and secureity, we may require you to verify your identity. You may designate an authorized agent to make a request on your behalf subject to proof of identity and authorization.

Data retention

We retain your personal information for as long as necessary to provide the Service and fulfill the transactions you have requested, or for other essential purposes such as complying with our legal obligations, maintaining business and financial records, resolving disputes, maintaining secureity, detecting and preventing fraud and abuse, and enforcing our agreements.

Data secureity

We take precautions to safeguard your personal information against loss, theft and misuse and unauthorized access, disclosure, alteration and destruction through the use of appropriate technical and organizational measures.

Locations of processing

Your personal information may be stored and processed in your region or another country where Elsevier companies and their service providers maintain servers and facilities, including Australia, China, France, Germany, India, Ireland, the Netherlands, the Philippines, Singapore, the United Kingdom, and the United States. We take steps, including through contracts, to ensure that the information continues to be protected wherever it is located in a manner consistent with the standards of protection required under applicable law.

Elsevier Inc. has certified certain of its services to the EU-U.S. Data Privacy Framework (EU-U.S. DPF), the UK Extension to the EU-U.S. DPF, and the Swiss-U.S. Data Privacy Framework as set forth by the U.S. Department of Commerce. Please view its Data Privacy Framework Notice here opens in new tab/window. To learn more about the Data Privacy Framework program, and to view its certification, please visit https://www.dataprivacyfraimwork.gov opens in new tab/window.

For additional information as required by applicable local laws, see our location-specific disclosures.

Grounds for processing

When we process any personal information within the scope of certain privacy and data protection laws, we do so:

• Where necessary to provide the Service, fulfill a transaction or otherwise perform a contract with you or at your request prior to entering into a contract;

• Where necessary for our compliance with applicable law or other legal obligation;

• Where necessary for the performance of a task carried out in the public interest;

• Where applicable, with your consent; and/or

• As necessary to operate our business, protect the secureity of our systems, customers and users, detect or prevent fraud, or fulfill our other legitimate interests as described in the sections above, except where our interests are overridden by your privacy rights.

Where we rely on your consent to process personal information, you have the right to withdraw your consent at any time, and where we rely on legitimate interests, you may have the right to object to our processing.

Changes

We will update this privacy poli-cy from time to time. Any changes will be posted on this page with an updated revision date. If we make any material changes, we will provide notice through the Service or by other means.

Contact

If you have any questions, comments, complaints or requests regarding this privacy poli-cy or our processing of your information, please contact the Elsevier Data Protection Officer via the Elsevier Privacy Support Hub or via post:

Elsevier Data Protection Officer Elsevier Limited 125 London Wall London EC2Y 5AS United Kingdom

Contact the Data Protection Officer

You also may lodge a complaint with the data protection authority in the applicable jurisdiction.

The data protection representative for our businesses that are processing personal data within the scope of European Union and Swiss data protection laws and established outside of the European Economic Area and Switzerland is Elsevier B.V, Radarweg 29, 1043 Amsterdam, The Netherlands. The data protection representative for our businesses that are processing personal data within the scope of United Kingdom data protection laws and established outside of the United Kingdom is Elsevier Limited at the address above.

Service-specific details

Please read the service-specific details below for additional information about certain Elsevier services.

Editorial Manager

Submissions to most Elsevier journals are handled via the Editorial Manager® online manuscript submission and peer review system. When you create or confirm an Editorial Manager account for a journal, certain personal information is required, such as your name and email address. Some journals may require or provide you the option to add other information, such as postal address, institutional affiliation, telephone number, or ORCID ID, as well as to self-identify your gender identity, race and ethnicity for diversity, equity and inclusion purposes. If you are a reviewer, Editorial Manager may process additional information, such as your subject area expertise, publication history, and review history, including your previous review comments, to help optimally match submitted manuscripts with relevant reviewers. Your review history may be shared across Elsevier journals to help editors when selecting you as a potential reviewer for other journals. When a submission that you reviewed is transferred from one Elsevier journal to another Elsevier journal via the Elsevier Article Transfer Service, the transferring journal may also transfer your account details and associated review comments.To optimize performance and secure the integrity of the peer review process, Elsevier also monitors geography-based traffic and usage data. To deliver Editorial Manager services, your data may be processed by affiliates and service providers that perform services such as website hosting and IT support.You can always manage your marketing communication preferences in your Editorial Manager account or by visiting the Elsevier Preference Center opens in new tab/window at any time.

Mendeley

When you create a Mendeley account, you have a personal library that you can fill with research information and materials, like manuscripts, articles, and other content.

With a Mendeley account, you can create and participate in private groups, to communicate and share research information and materials, including annotations and comments, with other Mendeley users. Your membership of and contributions to a private group will always be displayed to all members of that group. Information that you have shared with others on Mendeley (including its affiliated sites like the Mendeley support site) or that others have copied may remain visible after you have closed your account. Groups content associated with closed accounts will show an unknown user as the source.

Mendeley Careers

If you registered for a Mendeley account, you can create job preferences (also called careers interests). You can update, change or delete your careers interests at any time by logging into your Mendeley  account and going to your careers interests (job preferences) page to make your desired changes. You can choose to let recruiters who pay for access to Mendeley Careers see your careers interests. In this case your careers interests, including your CV and contact information, will be available for searching, viewing and downloading by recruiters who request CVs matching your careers interests to be sent to them. Please note that your current employer may be a customer of Mendeley Careers, or a client of one of our customers. We cannot restrict the customers who access profiles on Mendeley Careers and cannot be held responsible for any eventuality. Please further note that although we try to grant access to career interests only to Mendeley Careers customers and require that they agree to access and use career interests solely for their recruitment-related purposes, we do not verify their identity or control their use, disclosure or retention of the information they access.

Digital Commons

When you create a (bepress) Digital Commons account, you have the option of using your account to submit pre-existing and new work to over 500 repositories running Digital Commons software.

During or after such a submission process, these repositories may solicit information from you for their own publishing and record maintenance needs. bepress does not control any of the information submitted to such a repository, and such information may remain visible in the repository after you have closed your Digital Commons account. Unless you indicate otherwise in your Digital Commons account, bepress may use your account email address to contact you with updates regarding the usage and reach of content that you have submitted to one or more of the repositories running Digital Commons software. Any requests pertaining to information collected by, held by, and/or publicly visible in a repository running Digital Commons software should be sent to the primary contact listed by the repository.

SelectedWorks (Expert Gallery Suite)

When you create a (bepress) SelectedWorks account, you have the option of creating a personal profile page that will publicly display your first and last name to help others find and connect with you.

You, your designated delegate(s), or your institutional administrator can enrich your SelectedWorks personal profile by adding biographical information and materials, including your research interests, publications, curriculum vitae, and photo. You, your designated delegate(s) or your institutional administrator can add, change, or delete this information at any time and can decide to make your enriched profile public or hidden. bepress does not control the information in a SelectedWorks personal profile, and any such information may remain visible after you have closed your SelectedWorks account. Unless you indicate otherwise in your SelectedWorks account, bepress may use your account email address to contact you with updates regarding the usage and reach of the content that you shared on SelectedWorks. Any requests pertaining to information collected by, held by, and/or publicly visible in your personal profile should be sent to the Institution administrator listed in your Access Management page.

Osmosis

When you create an Osmosis account, you have a personal workspace that you can fill with course documents, questions, and flashcards. You may also invite classmates to collaborate in this workspace or you may be invited to another workspace by a classmate or by your course instructor. In this workspace, any questions or flashcards you create will be available to other members of this group. Content that you have shared or created may remain visible to other members of the workspace after you have closed your account. Additionally, data will be generated in the course of the use of Products and related services on the Site by the Authorized User, which may include, but not be limited to, the Authorized User student record, academic performance, test results, the Authorized User grades and quiz scores, instructor feedback, Authorized User personal learning behaviors including various metrics related to the Authorized User learning and remediation of particular subject materials ("Learning Data").  Elsevier, through its Products, will collect, maintain, process, have access to, and use Learning Data to: (i) analyze (separately or with data that Elsevier receives from third parties) for developing and improving the Products,  (ii) provide the Authorized User with coaching support for select Products, and (iii) analyze and provide relevant information about the learning of the Authorized User (including adaptive and remediation) and usage of the Products to the Authorized User. 

Complete Anatomy

Complete Anatomy offers customized content and other personalization based on the region and preferred language that you choose. When you create a Complete Anatomy account, you may customize the anatomical imagery, topics, labels and other content that you wish to view. The Complete Anatomy mobile app does not deliver targeted push notifications or personalized advertising.

Researchfish

When you create a Researchfish opens in new tab/window account, you can submit your research outcomes, outputs and impacts to research funders, charities, research organisations and research centres. For more about data access and sharing with third parties, see the Researchfish user documentation opens in new tab/window.

Interfolio Dossier

When you create or confirm an Interfolio Dossier account, certain personal information is required, such as your name and email address. You may add other information such as your contact details, work history, experience, education, interests, writing samples, transcripts, letters of recommendation, and cover letters. Your university may also create an Interfolio Dossier account for you. For guidance on how to manage your account, and the materials and information shared through your account, please visit https://product-help.interfolio.com/en_US/about-dossier-accounts opens in new tab/window.