No advertising or third-party analytics
This site runs no third-party analytics, advertising, or tracking scripts of any kind. We don't sell or share visitor data, and nothing here follows you to other sites.
Privacy Policy
This covers VSTE's journal-publishing platform as a whole — every journal hosted here. No tracking, no advertising, no third-party analytics. Here's exactly what this site does.
Article views and downloads
To show how often articles are read, we count article views and PDF downloads ourselves. For each visit we record only the country, worked out from your IP address with a database kept on our own server; the IP address itself is never stored and no cookies are used. A repeat visit on the same day is recognised by a one-way code that can't identify you and changes every day. Editors see these figures only as totals per country and per article.
What's stored locally
Your login session, theme preference, a small cached copy of a journal's branding for instant repaints, and whether you've dismissed this notice — all in your browser's own local storage, never a tracking cookie, never readable by any other site.
Signing in with ORCID
If you choose to sign in or link your account via ORCID, we receive your authenticated ORCID iD directly from ORCID's own authorization process — we never see or store your ORCID password. See ORCID's own privacy policy for how ORCID handles your data.
Server requests
Like essentially every web server, ours briefly processes the IP address a request comes from — for example, to limit repeated failed login attempts, and to work out the country for the visit statistics above. It's never stored with those statistics, never used for tracking, profiling, or advertising, and never shared with third parties.
Content you submit
Manuscripts, profile details, reviews, and editorial correspondence are used only to operate that journal's own submission and peer-review process, by the editorial staff and reviewers handling your submission.
Questions about this policy? Please contact the editorial office of the journal you're working with.