Topics
Background
We are an academic research database, whose primary mission is to record experimental provenance and communicate data among scientists with shared research interests. For example, we are focused on the following issues and questions :
- experimental provenance : Who were the experimenters, technicians, and principal investigators involved?
- data access and auditing : Which contacts can view or modify these experimental data? Who has accessed these data?
- research collaboration : How do I get in touch with the experimenter for this data of interest? Can a novel collaboration be fostered?
- research communication : How do I get in touch with the authors of this published dataset?
- service reliability : How do we maintain service quality for our researchers?
- Occasionally, research on human subjects : How do you, the researcher, meet your responsibilities to your data subjects with regards to consent and data anonymization (regulations covered by either HIPAA, or more broadly, the European Union's GDPR)?
Basic Account Information and Personal Identification
To address the issues and questions above, and service these requests, we capture the following contact information:
- your real name, always
- your email address, always
- your laboratory affiliation, usually
- your postal addresses, phone numbers, and research interests, optionally
Further, our services also collect your IP address and usage data, automatically.
We also use cookies, to track your session and assist with authentication and data access.
If you are uncomfortable with any of our requests of your personally identifying data (above), you should opt-out of using our services. Also, if cookies are blocked, you will not be able to use our services.
Public Infomation
If your research data is viewable, anyone that can see that data can contact you about it (using the Basic Account Information, above). Similarly, if your data is published (i.e. world-viewable) this means your email is also public/world-viewable. Our approach is similar to the "Author Information" sections that are available from either PubMed, a scientific journal's website, or perhaps within the text of your own manuscripts.
Usage of Contact and Personally Identifiable Data
As mentioned above, we are concerned with experimental provenance, scientific collaboration/communication, and providing reliable services.-
We simply use your personal information to meet those objectives,
including :
- Facilitating scientific correspondence with your peers, regarding your data
- Contacting you when database services or policies changes. If you no longer wish to be notified of these happenings, please contact us, and we can flag your account as "inactive", and you will longer receive email from us.
- Auditing our users, by IP address, hopefully:
- ensuring that legitimate research requests are prioritized over spurious requests, and
- understanding and improving personalized research workflows, on request.
Use of Cookies
We use a browser-cookie so that you do not have to repetitively
authenticate over the course of a database-session. This cookie
lasts for as long as the browser remains active. However, if no
user-activity is detected for a couple hours, the previously
authenticated session is terminated on the server side. To actively
terminate your authenticated database session on the client-side,
close your browser or click the "Logout" button found at the
top-right of each page's header. This is the recommended action if
you are using a shared computer, so that someone that immediately
follows you does not have access to your data, inadvertently.