Privacy Policy & Scholar Data Protection

1. Regulatory Framework, Data Controller & Scope

AFRIK Academic Press (“AFRIK”, “the Press”, “we”, “us”) is committed to the highest standards of data sovereignty, privacy protection, and scholarly transparency. This Privacy Policy governs the collection, processing, storage, and preservation of personal data across our publishing infrastructure, journal portals, translation repositories, and APIs.

The Data Controller for all processing activities is the AFRIK Research Foundation, operating in institutional partnership with the Foresight Institute of Research and Translation (FIRAT) (Nigeria & Rwanda), the College for Advancement of Academics (CAA), and Galaxy Nova Technologies & Innovations (GNTI).

Our data processing practices strictly comply with applicable continental and international data protection laws, including:

• Nigeria Data Protection Act (NDPA 2023): Regulating scholar data sovereignty, lawful processing, and cross-border research transfers;
• African Union Convention on Cyber Security and Personal Data Protection (Malabo Convention): Upholding continental standards for electronic data security and personal privacy;
• South African Protection of Personal Information Act (POPIA): Enforcing responsible information handling and researcher rights;
• General Data Protection Regulation (EU GDPR 2016/679): Governing European authors, international reviewers, and global institutional collaborations.

2. Categories of Scholarly & Technical Data Collected

We collect and process only the minimum personal data strictly necessary to administer academic peer review, publish scientific literature, ensure research reproducibility, and maintain permanent bibliographic records:

• Scholar Identity & Profile Data: Full legal name, academic title (Prof., Dr., etc.), verified ORCID iD, primary university or institutional affiliation, faculty department, institutional email address, postal jurisdiction, biographical summary, and disciplinary expertise tags.
• Manuscript & Scholarly Contribution Data: Manuscript titles, abstracts, research texts, mathematical formulas, datasets, author contribution statements (CRediT taxonomy), conflict of interest disclosures, funding acknowledgments, and ethical approval certificates.
• Peer Review & Editorial Governance Data: Reviewer evaluations, rubric scores, editorial recommendations, confidential remarks to handling editors, conflict-of-interest recusals, revision tracking, and decision letters.
• Translation Commons Data: Translation submissions, segment evaluations, scholarly rationales, dialect notes, terminology neologisms, and consensus voting records.
• Technical Telemetry & Access Data: Internet Protocol (IP) addresses, cryptographic session tokens, passkey public keys, browser user-agent headers, timestamped access logs, article view/download counters, and API query logs.

3. Lawful Bases for Processing Scholar Data

In accordance with NDPA Section 25 and GDPR Article 6, AFRIK processes your personal data under the following lawful bases:

• Contractual Necessity: Processing is required to perform our publishing agreement with you—specifically to intake submissions, administer double-blind peer review, typeset manuscripts, register permanent DOIs, and publish accepted works.
• Legitimate Academic & Public Interests: Processing is necessary for scientific research integrity, historical preservation of intellectual findings, prevention of scientific fraud, duplicate submission detection, and citation verification.
• Compliance with Legal Obligations: Processing is necessary to comply with international research governance, bioethics documentation mandates, and statutory reporting obligations.
• Consent: Where applicable, for optional participation in academic surveys, institutional announcements, or specialized editorial advisory boards.

5. Peer Reviewer Anonymity & Double-Blind Confidentiality

To safeguard unbiased academic critique and intellectual independence:

• Cryptographic Reviewer Blinding: In double-blind review journals, reviewer identities are strictly isolated from authors. Even after publication, reviewer evaluations are preserved without identifying information in public records.
• Confidential Remarks: Reviewers' confidential comments directed to the Handling Editor or Editor-in-Chief are never disclosed to authors, co-authors, or external third parties.
• Immunity from Freedom of Information / Discovery: Peer review evaluation notes and editorial deliberation archives are treated as confidential scholarly evaluations and are shielded from disclosure to the fullest extent permissible under law.

6. Third-Party Bibliographic Disclosures & Zero-Sale Guarantee

AFRIK operates under an ethical open-access charter:

• ZERO SALE OF SCHOLAR DATA: We NEVER sell, rent, monetize, lease, or trade personal data, researcher profiles, or browsing habits to commercial brokers, data aggregators, or advertising networks. We deploy ZERO commercial third-party advertising trackers.
• Global Bibliographic Indexing: Published metadata (title, authors, affiliations, abstract, references, DOI) is disseminated worldwide to scholarly indexing agencies and preservation archives, including Crossref, ORCID, Directory of Open Access Journals (DOAJ), PubMed Central, Web of Science, Scopus, Google Scholar, and institutional repository networks.
• Digital Preservation Networks: Full texts and metadata are archived in permanent distributed digital preservation vaults, including LOCKSS, CLOCKSS, Portico, and sovereign continental mirrors, ensuring that African research remains accessible in perpetuity.

7. Retention Schedules & Data Minimization

We retain personal data strictly according to established academic schedules:

• Published Authors & Articles: Retained perpetually in the global scholarly record and digital preservation vaults.
• Rejected or Withdrawn Submissions: Manuscript files and metadata are retained for five (5) years following the final rejection decision solely for plagiarism auditing, duplicate submission tracking, and dispute verification, after which raw manuscript files may be archived or purged.
• Peer Review Records: Preserved for ten (10) years following publication to verify editorial integrity and COPE compliance audits.
• Technical Logs & Session Tokens: System access logs, IP logs, and authentication tokens are rotated and securely expunged after ninety (90) days.

8. Scholar Rights, Data Access & Compliance Office

Subject to the archival exemptions outlined in Section 4, researchers maintain statutory rights under the NDPA, GDPR, and POPIA:

• Right of Access & Portability: You may request an export of your personal profile, submission history, and review records in structured JSON or CSV format.
• Right of Rectification: You may update or correct inaccurate personal details in your scholar profile at any time.
• Right to Lodge a Complaint: If you believe our processing violates data protection laws, you have the right to lodge a formal complaint with the relevant supervisory authority, such as the Nigeria Data Protection Commission (NDPC) or your national regulator.

To exercise your rights or submit a formal inquiry, contact our Data Protection Officer at [email protected] or write to: