PRIVACY POLICY
“Platforma СoLab” LLC (“CoLab”, “we”, “us”, “platform”, or “our”) provides the Platforms rendered to you through the CoLab website available at https://colab.ws, and through any of its web pages and associated applications which may be available on multiple devices, including mobile applications (“Platform”).
This Privacy Policy sets forth the collection and use practices of CoLab for personal data we process in the course of providing the Platform.
Our ambition is to connect scientific groups and individual researchers providing the instruments for collaboration are accessible to everyone. We also establish the accessibility of the publication activity analytics and similar data as much as it is possible for us. Additionally, we gather external information to distribute as much pertinent scientific content as possible in order to improve research experience. Any natural or legal person who, as a recipient of the Platform, accesses or uses the Platform for any purpose is a User (“User”, “you”). Our registered Users (“Users with Personal profile”) can share their professional identities, credentials, scientific interests, their scientometrics and peer reviews to collaborate with other researchers or laboratories, exchange knowledge and professional insights, post and view relevant content, and discover business and career opportunities. Some content is also visible to unregistered or logged-out Users (“Visitors”). A User could be a Users with Personal profile or a Visitor. An Author (“Author”) is a natural person who, for the purpose of our Platform, is an author/editor of a publication. An Author is not necessarily a User or Users with Personal profile of our Platform. Our Platform considers your work, scientific interests, skills and publications and interactions to connect you with relevant information and suggest pertinent content for Users with Personal profile and Visitors.
CoLab reserves the right to modify this Privacy Policy at any time, in particular, to reflect changes in market conditions affecting CoLab’s activities, changes in technology, changes in relevant laws and regulatory requirements, and changes in CoLab’s system capabilities. If we make material changes to this Privacy Policy, we may notify Users with Personal profile by email or other reasonable means, including through notifications on our Platform. If you object to any new version, you should stop using our Platform and/or close your account. If you continue to use our Platform after having been provided with such notice you will be deemed to have acknowledged the Privacy Policy.
Basic data processed
Certain data will be processed when you access the Platform, to resolve the technical request of your device, display the site and maintain the safety and security of our systems.
This data is stored in so-called logs and comprise the following:
- IP addresses and your mobile device's Identifier for Advertising (IDFA);
- the type of computer or mobile device you are using including operating system and version;
- the types of browser you are using, the language, and your country;
- referring and exit pages and URLs;
- platform type;
- the number of clicks on a page or feature, pages viewed and the order of those pages, the amount of time spent on particular pages or parts of pages;
- domain names and;
- information collected for performance purposes (e.g. average load, render time of pages, etc.).
Even though IP addresses and mobile identifiers are generally considered personal data, we can
not derive any direct conclusions about your identity from such data.
All of our pages are secured using SSL (Secure Socket Layer) technology, which encrypts data
transmitted between our servers and your end devices. We also apply other suitable technical
and organizational measures to protect your personal data.
Personal data we process
In order to provide you with functionalities, we need to process certain data and/or information relating to you.
Registration and maintenance of your User account and Personal profile
If you choose to create a User account on our Platform, you will be required, during the registration process, to provide your first and last name, an email address, and a password. You will receive a confirmation email. Your User account will be confirmed after you have clicked on the respective link in the account activation email. Users are also able to register through the Oauth identificators and providers such as ORCID and Telegram. You may also be invited to associate certain information we present to you with your account, such as research interests, institutional affiliation, and scientific degree.
Authorized Users with an account can also create a Personal profile of a researcher. The data given in the profile will be utilized in the interests of User specified in the Section 3 if the current Privacy Policy.
Other personal data
During the registration process or when updating your profile, you can choose to provide other information that can be used to identify and/or contact you, including for example, a profile picture, your social media accounts or your current affiliations and scientific interests.
Third-party connectors
You can choose to create an account using your ORCID, Telegram or Google account and subsequently use that third-party platform’s credentials to log in to your CoLab account. Using this option means that you are allowing CoLab to request and use certain data from the third-party account. For Google, this involves us processing your email address. For ORCID, we will process your email address, first and last name, and information about your publications. For Facebook, we will process your email address and public profile information. The third-party platform might ask for your consent to share this data with CoLab. As the personal data we might process was originally collected by the third-party platform, the initial data processing and sharing of the data with CoLab are governed by the privacy policy of such third-party platform. Please refer to the relevant third-party platform and/or its settings, if you want to deactivate the connection between CoLab and the third-party platform. CoLab could provide data submitted by Users voluntarily to third parties in order to offer vacancies according to the specified skills, research interests, education and work experience. We also could transfer the first and last name, email address, ORCID and CoLab ID identifiers of Users to third parties when registering or authorizing Users using CoLab ID on third-party Platforms.
Communications with us
You could contact with us using our email address: info@colab.ws. When you communicate with us, you may provide us with your name, contact details, and other personal data as part of your communication, as well as the content of your message itself. Similarly, when we communicate with you, we will process your personal information, such as your email address. For some of our emails, we also process information indicating whether you have opened the email.
Communications through the Platform
Many communications that you initiate through our Platform (e.g. invitation sent to a User without Personal profile) will list your name in the header of the message. Other communications that you initiate through the Platform will list your name as the initiator but will not include your personal email address. Once you have mutually connected with an individual, contact information you choose to include in your researcher profile will be accessible by that individual. Sending spam, hate speech, unauthorized commercial offers or doubtable political statements entails deleting your account and profile at our discretion, as it contradicts the ethical principles of the Platform.
Recommendations
In order to provide our recommendation features, we process contact and bibliographical data, information pertaining to your work, usage frequency, type of devices you use to use the Platform, including browser, operating system and mobile device, research items you consulted, interaction with particular pages or parts of pages, and number of clicks on a page or feature, in order to provide the Platform in a way that is tailored to your interests. Also, based on the personal data you provide, statistical evaluations, mathematical operations, and predictions, we may infer other information about you and support our recommendation features.
Third-party providers
When you choose to benefit from a Platform or offer presented by CoLab on behalf of a third party, you may share personal data with CoLab to enable us to pass it on to the third party. CoLab could provide data submitted by users voluntarily to third parties in order to offer vacancies according to the specified skills, research interests, education and work experience.
Security
We process the number of profile pages users view to detect and prevent data harvesting. We also process your IP address to filter out suspicious requests. If you are a User, we store your full IP address in connection with your account registration request and your current last login. Otherwise, your login activities are only stored in connection with your truncated IP addresses. Also, we process information about your device, its operating system and the browser you are using for your current session.
Statistics
We use activity data, such as number of publications and citations, to generate statistics, which pertain to reading behavior or achievements.
The following explanations will provide you with information about how we use the personal data that we collect about you:
- to provide and improve our Platform;
- to perform internal quality checks;
- to prevent, detect, process and investigate malfunctions, incidents, fraudulent or other illegal activities, or mitigate the risk of occurrence of the aforementioned events;
- to ensure network and information security;
- to create statistics on access channels and the use of our Platform;
- to contact you, if requested by you or if necessary to fulfill the contract or permitted by law;
- to enforce obligations owed to us, and contractual terms and conditions;
- and for accounting, risk management and record keeping purposes.
More specifically, we may use your data for the following purposes.
CoLab.ws account
The personal data you provide will be used to create, maintain, and secure your account. By creating a Personal profile, you will benefit from functionalities and Platform that are not available to Visitors. Any personal data you provide in addition to the required data to register for an account, will facilitate your ability to get into contact with other Users and receive more relevant recommendations from our recommendation Platforms. Your CoLab account is generally visible to every other User, but you can determine the level of visibility: a) available for everyone with search engine, b) available for everyone with the link and c) available only for you.
Communications
Depending on the way you are communicating with us, we may use your name, email address, telephone number, and the content of your previous correspondence to respond to you and provide assistance. As a public-facing company, we have a legitimate interest in being able to receive, process, and respond to enquiries.
Offer Users internal activity insights
Your interaction with and interest in other Researchers’ work is as valuable to them as it is to you. Therefore, we process information about your publications, citations, research interests and other related information. Where we rely on our legitimate interest to offer these internal activity insights, we believe our aim to provide you and fellow CoLab Users with statistics, and, where applicable, additional details about interactions, does not conflict with your expectations, interest and rights. The described data processing, which is limited, is appropriate to achieve the desired objective of helping Users understand how their work is consumed.
Offer Users external activity insights
Where Users choose to benefit from receiving external activity insights, we might provide them with additional information such as consumption, mentions, news coverage etc. relating to their profile and work on the Platform. To do so, we may associate aggregated and anonymous information we gather from outside CoLab with your work, to provide information about how Users found your publicly available work on CoLab, and what has referred them to it (e.g. which search engine). We might also offer features that provide information about instances where you and/or your publicly available work on the Platform are mentioned on third-party websites, platforms, or Platforms. For example, when your work is mentioned on social media or other external platforms/websites/blogs, we might gather these mentions, potentially including surrounding context, and enrich insights about your work with them. We might directly show this third-party content to you by displaying or embedding it in our Platform, or providing references such as links to the content. We might use the help of external, third parties to achieve these purposes. Where such third parties are processing personal data, they are described in Section 5 Third party Platforms for analytics, measurement and ad delivery.
Offer Users tailored content
Using our recommendation technology, we process your personal data or infer information in order to provide the Platform in a way that is tailored to your interests. This enables us to customize the features and offerings CoLab provides to you through the Platform. For example, we provide dynamic web pages that are individually adapted to you. We may present content recommendations such as research items that are suggested for you and/or recommendations regarding other individuals, such as researchers to follow or connect with, or related researchers. In the same way that you benefit from content and individuals recommended to you, you and your content might be recommended to other Users and therefore might appear in their experience, for example in their home feed. We derive learning from Users’ interactions with tailored content and suggestions and subsequently take them into account to improve any further offerings of tailored content. This processing does not conflict with your interests as it corresponds with a person’s reasonable expectations when signing up for an account. The processing has no negative impact for our Users but is in their interests as it allows CoLab to provide them a tailored Platform.
Offer Users tailored advertising content and relevant jobs
As a User, we aim to offer you advertising content that is most relevant to you. In this context, we use, whether separately or combined, the personal data you provide, we collect, or we infer from your use of the Platform and the Internet and also contextual information of the site you are currently visiting. This enables us to display advertisements that best match your particular interests, and job suggestions that are relevant to your scientific field, experience and research. For further information about advertisements on the Platform, please refer to Section 4 Advertisements on CoLab below. We aim to display the most relevant and most helpful advertisements to you. To be able to do this, we must take your interests, your journey, and some of your personal data into account. Without this processing, the advertisements we would be able to disseminate would not be different from random advertisements you can see everywhere in the Internet. We take great care in choosing the right advertising partners and limiting the personal data we process. The personal data that we process for this purpose will not be shared with any third party except our technical Platform provider (see Section 5 Third party Platforms), and will only support our purposes. Given that we limit the data processed, do not share it with other third parties, and process your personal data to display only relevant advertisements to you, we believe that our legitimate interest to monetize our platform and therefore continue to provide you with the Platform outweighs.
Offer Visitors tailored advertising content and jobs
As a Visitor, we also aim to offer you advertising content that is most relevant to you. In the case of Visitors, this means that the third parties delivering advertisements may take into account the context of the current site you are visiting. For further information about advertisements on the Platform, please refer to Section 4 Advertisements on CoLab below. Because some parts of our Platform are available to everyone, even those who don’t have an account with us, we believe that wherever we haven’t asked you for your consent, the data processing conducted is of such limited effect on you, that our interest to monetize the platform and therefore continue to provide the Platform also to Users without Personal profile, is legitimate.
Ensure the security of your personal data
We process your personal data in order to avoid its accidental or unlawful destruction, as well as its loss, alteration, or unauthorized disclosure. For example, we process the number of profile pages you and others view so as to detect and prevent data harvesting. Likewise, we truncate the last octet of your IP address to prevent you from being identified. We are legally obliged to secure data from unauthorized loss and alteration and it is also in our mutual interest to ensure data security. As this primarily serves the purpose of protecting your data there are no overriding interests on your part.
Generate statistics
We use your personal data to generate statistics which pertain to reading/search behavior and achievements. We also generate statistics for internal purposes in order to constantly improve the Platform and its features. We also conduct research and development to maintain quality and improve our Platform and the User experience. We might also share research results with scientific bodies for science studies and related topics.
The ad must be legitimate.
Do not place offers, conditions or information in ads that violate the legislation of the Russian Federation or the country of your Occupation or contribute to such violations.
You have the right to place only those ads for which you have all the necessary rights, licenses, registrations, permits, certificates, etc.
Before placing an ad, you must verify the legality of all its elements (including photos, links to third-party sites, when they are allowed, etc.). You will be responsible for any violations of the law or the rights of third parties that you have committed yourself.
Prohibited ads
Ads containing the following information will be deleted:
- narcotic drugs and psychotropic substances, their precursors and any products for their use; potent and poisonous substances, the illicit trafficking of which is prohibited by Article 234 of the Criminal Code of the Russian Federation;
- explosives and materials, explosive devices;
- weapons, including: chemical, biological, firearms, pneumatic, cold, hunting, traumatic, gas, electric shock, throwing, sports, signaling, collectible, purified, deactivated, souvenir, models.
Yandex Services
We use Yandex Metrics to evaluate the usage behavior on our Service. Yandex Metrics is a web analysis service provided by YANDEX LLC, 16 Lva Tolstogo St., Moscow 119021, Russia.
Some of your personal data is accessible to other Users of our platform who may, for example, visit your publication pages or profile.
Your personal data may also be transferred to third parties as described in this Privacy Policy and where applicable to those third parties listed in our consent modal. These parties might be advertisers or companies that help us disseminate advertisements, measure the performance of our advertisements and/or analyze your use of the Service. These third parties will not receive data that directly personally identifies you. The data shared is limited to identifiers such as IP addresses and cookie IDs. Your name, email address, and other directly identifying data will only be shared with third parties if you explicitly allow us to share this data.
We may use third party service providers, in particular for technical and business services, tax advisors and legal counsel. These service providers receive personal data solely for the performance of their services for us on our behalf. They are contractually obliged not to use personal data for other purposes.
We respect your rights stipulated by Federal Law No. 152-FZ “On Personal Data” (hereinafter referred to as the Law), namely:
- right to know how and what of your data we use (Article 18 of the Law),
- right to access your personal data. You can request them from us at any time (Article 14 of the Law),
- right to withdraw consent to processing if we process data with your consent (Article 9 of the Law). To withdraw your consent, write us at: "Platforma colab" LLC, INN 9701188212, address: room 3a, bld. 7, 1-st, Baumanskaya Street, Moscow, Russia 105005, or contact us at: info@colab.ws,
- right to specify, delete data, restrict processing or object to processing.
You can at any time correct your data, delete them on your own or ask us to do so. If you believe that we: process the data illegally, in greater scope than required, not with the objectives stated, you can send us objections against data processing or a demand to restrict processing (Article 21 of the Law).
For Users with Personal profile, we generally store their personal data as long as their account is active.
If you have created an account, you can close by sending an email (info@colab.ws) with the Request for deletion of the data.
In general, personal data from closed or inactive accounts will be deleted or anonymized from our system backups one year after the account is closed or deactivated.
We only keep personal data for the time strictly necessary in order to enable the use of our Service and/or to fulfill the purposes identified above, and/or to comply with any legal or regulatory obligations. In all other cases, we delete your personal data with the exception of such data that we are required to retain for the purpose of contractual or statutory (e.g., taxation or commercial law) retention periods.