Information for researchers

Why you are reading this

AcaTorch helps students and researchers find academic groups working in a given field. To do that it reads public bibliographic records and may hold information about you as a published author, even though you do not have an account with us and have never contacted us.

Data protection law requires us to tell you when we hold personal data that we did not obtain from you. That is what this page does. If you would rather we did not hold it, see asking us to remove your information below — we will act on that request.

Who we are

[Legal entity name to be confirmed], [Registered address to be confirmed], is the data controller. For anything on this page, contact privacy@acatorch.com.

What we hold

• your name as it appears in the author list of published work
• the institution and country shown in those publications
• publication counts, citation-based metrics and publication dates derived from public records
• titles, identifiers and years of the publications themselves
• automatically generated summaries describing the research themes your published work covers

Where a user has added you to their own workspace, that user may also have recorded their own notes and a contact address they obtained elsewhere, such as from a departmental web page.

The summaries are produced by an automated language model from your publication record. They are an aid to finding relevant research, not an assessment of you, and they can be wrong. If a summary about you is inaccurate, tell us and we will correct or remove it.

Where it comes from

All of it derives from publicly available bibliographic databases: PubMed (US National Library of Medicine) and iCite (US National Institutes of Health). We do not buy personal data, and we do not collect anything from private or restricted sources.

Why we use it, and our lawful basis

We rely on our legitimate interests, and those of our users, in making published academic work discoverable — so that someone looking for a research group can find the people already publishing in that field. This mirrors the purpose for which the underlying databases publish the records.

We have weighed that against your interests. The data concerns your professional activity rather than your private life, it is already public, we do not use it to make decisions about you, and we act on objections. You can ask us for our assessment.

What we do not do

• we do not send you marketing, and we do not email you at all
• we do not sell, rent or share this information with data brokers
• we do not use it to make automated decisions producing legal or similarly significant effects about you
• we do not combine it with private or sensitive information about you

Our terms of service prohibit users from using anything they find here for bulk or unsolicited messaging, harassment, or building contact lists. If a user contacts you individually, they are the sender and are responsible for that message — but we would still like to know, so please tell us.

How long we keep it

Analyses are stored in the workspace of the user who ran them, for as long as that user keeps them. Cached copies of external research data expire automatically. If you ask for removal, we also suppress your records from future analyses, as described below.

Your rights

You have the right to access what we hold about you, to have it corrected, to have it erased, to restrict how it is used, and — since we rely on legitimate interests — to object to our using it at all.

You may also complain to your local data protection supervisory authority.

Asking us to remove your information

Email privacy@acatorch.com from an address we can reasonably connect to your published work — normally your institutional address — telling us the name and affiliation as they appear in publications. We do not need identity documents.

We will, within one month:

• remove your records from stored analyses and from users' saved lists
• add you to a suppression list so future analyses do not reintroduce you
• confirm in writing once it is done

Suppression is the important part. Removing records alone would be temporary, because the next search of the public databases would find your publications again. The suppression list is what makes removal stick.

To be clear about the limits of what we can do: we cannot remove your work from PubMed or any other external database, and we cannot affect copies a user has already exported or written down elsewhere. Contact the relevant database directly for the source records.