Privacy Policy

UCL Press is a department of University College London (‘UCL’). Our primary business involves open access publishing and dissemination. UCL is registered as a data controller with the Information Commisioners Office; more information about UCL’s privacy policies can be found on UCL’s data protection website.

You can contact UCL Press as follows:

FAO: UCL Press, UCL, Gower Street, London, UK Email: uclpresspublishing@ucl.ac.uk  

If you would like to submit a request for information under freedom of information or use any of your individual rights under data protection legislation (e.g. the right of access to your personal data), please contact foi@ucl.ac.uk or data-protection@ucl.ac.uk respectively.

Information that you provide to us

We will collect any information that you provide to us when you:

• when you are making an enquiry over the phone, by email or our website;
• subscribe to our mailing lists;
• submit manuscripts to us by post, email or via our website or journals submission system;
• enter into a contract with us to publish your book or journal article;
• submit an application to a job vacancy;
• order print books or other products from our website;
• create an account to order books or other products from our website;

The information you provide to us might include:

• Name
• Address
• Email address
• Phone number
• Research and academic affiliations
• ORCID ID
• Biography
• Publication proposal
• References
• Information about any subject areas that may be of interest
• if you are submitting a manuscript you may also provide additional information about your academic and work history, references and any other such similar information as may be supplied.

If you are ordering books,  you will also provide your payment details including:

• Credit or debit card details, including expiry date, card number and three digit expiry code (CVV);
• Delivery/Invoice address: house number/name, street address, town/city, postcode, country;
• The email address and telephone number used when you ordered

From time to time we might ask if you would be willing to participate in our surveys; if you agree, we will also collect any information that you provide as part of that survey.

Information we collect about you

• We will collect any information contained in any correspondence between us. For example, if you contact us using a query button on our website or by email or telephone, we will keep a record of that correspondence.
• We will also collect certain information about how you use our website and the device that you use to access our website and/or download open access content. This might include your IP address, geographical location, device information (such as your hardware model, mobile network information, unique device identifiers) This information may be collected by a third-party website analytics service provider on our behalf and/or may be collected using cookies. For more information on cookies please read the section below on Cookies

Information we receive from third parties

• In certain circumstances, we will receive information about you from third parties. For example,
  • we will receive information about you from third parties if they are referring you to us for publication. For example, if you are the co-author of a manuscript, your co-author will be required to provide us with information about you. Or if you have a literary agent making submissions on your behalf, your agent will provide us with information about you;
• We might also receive information about you from third parties if you have indicated to such third party that you would like to hear from us.

We will use your information for the purposes listed below either on the basis of:

• performance of your contract with us and the provision of our services to you;
• your consent (where we request it);
• our legitimate interests

We may use your information for the following purposes:

• to provide you with access to our website in a manner convenient and optimal and with personalised content relevant to you including sharing your information with our website hosts and developers (on the basis of our legitimate interest to ensure our website is presented in an effective and optimal manner);
• to enable receipt, review, editing, production and publication of your manuscript including sharing your information with our editorial and production service providers, peer-reviewers, third-party manuscript readers (on the basis of performing our contract with you);
• to administer your publishing contract;
• to administer orders made from our website and sharing your information with our distribution providers, NBN International (on the basis of performing our contract with you);
• to keep in contact with you about our news, events, new website features or services or new books that we believe may interest you, provided that we have the requisite permission to do so, and sharing your information with our marketing services providers (either on the basis of your consent where we have requested it, or our legitimate interests to provide you with marketing communications where we may lawfully do so);
• to share your information with selected third parties such as publishing partners and authors, to enable them to contact you with information about things that may interest you (where we have your consent to do so);
• to provide customer service and support (on the basis of our contract with you), deal with enquiries or complaints about the website and share your information with our website developers, distributors and payment services providers as necessary to provide customer support (on the basis of our legitimate interest in providing the correct products and services to our website users);
• to carry out aggregated and anonymised research about general engagement with our website (on the basis of our legitimate interest in providing the right kinds of products and services to our website users);
• to protect, investigate, and deter against fraudulent, unauthorised, or illegal activity, including without limitation plagiarism and identity fraud (on the basis of our legitimate interests to operate a safe and lawful business or where we have a legal obligation to do so); and
• to enable us to comply with our policies and procedures and enforce our legal rights, or to protect the rights, property or safety of our employees and share your information with our technical and legal advisors (on the basis of our legitimate interests to operate a safe and lawful business or where we have a legal obligation to do so).

Where we refer to using your information on the basis of our “legitimate interests”, we mean our legitimate business interests in conducting and managing our business and our relationship with you, including the legitimate interest we have in:

• personalising, enhancing, modifying or otherwise improving the services and/or communications that we provide to you;
• detecting and preventing fraud and operating a safe and lawful business;
• improving security and optimisation of our network, sites and services

Where we use your information for our legitimate interests, we make sure that we take into account any potential impact that such use may have on you. Our legitimate interests don’t automatically override yours and we won’t use your information if we believe your interests should override ours unless we have other grounds to do so (such as your consent or a legal obligation). If you have any concerns about our processing please refer to details of “Your Rights” below

In connection with the purposes and on the lawful grounds described above and in addition to the recipients of your information as described above, we may share your personal information with third parties that we work with such as:

• third parties we work with to deliver our business (including for example, hosting or operating the website and our databases (including shopping cart), site analytics, providing editorial production services, providing technical assistance and support and providing fraud and plagiarism detection services).
• any selected third party that you consent to our sharing your information with for marketing purposes;
• any prospective seller or buyer of such business or assets, only in the event that we decide to sell or buy any business or assets; and
• any other third parties (including legal or other advisors, regulatory authorities, courts and government agencies) where necessary to enable us to enforce our legal rights, or to protect the rights, property or safety of our employees or where such disclosure may be permitted or required by law.

We require third parties to maintain appropriate security to protect your information from unauthorised access or processing.

We operate a policy of “privacy by design” by looking for opportunities to minimise the amount of personal information we hold about you. We use appropriate technological and operational security measures  to protect your information against any unauthorised access or unlawful use, such as:

• maintaining a data protection policy for, and delivering data protection training to, our employees;
• ensuring the physical security of our offices, warehouses or other sites;
• ensuring the physical and digital security of our equipment and devices by using appropriate password protection [and encryption];
• limiting access to your personal information to those in our company who need to use it in the course of their work.

We will retain your information for as long as is necessary to provide you with the services that you have requested from us or for as long as we reasonably require to retain the information for our lawful business purposes, such as for the purposes of exercising our legal rights or where we are permitted to do so for purposes of academic, literary expression and research purposes. We operate a data retention policy and look to find ways to reduce the amount of information we hold about you and the length of time that we need to keep it.

We maintain a suppression list of email addresses of individuals who no longer wish to be contacted by us. In order to comply with the wishes of these individuals, we must store this information permanently.

You have certain rights in respect of the information that we hold about you, including:

• the right to ask us not to process your personal data for marketing purposes;
• the right to request access to the information that we hold about you; and
• in certain circumstances, the right to ask us to stop processing information about you.

You may exercise your rights above by contacting us using the details in the ‘About Us’ section of this Privacy Policy, or, in the case of preventing processing for marketing activities, also by checking certain boxes on forms that we use to collect your data to tell us that you don’t want to receive any marketing materials.

Please note that we may need to retain certain information for our own record-keeping and research purposes. We may also need to send you service-related communications relating to any website user account even when you have requested not to receive marketing communications.

In accordance with appropriate UK data protection laws, you have certain additional rights in respect of the information that we hold about you, including:

• the right to lodge a complaint about us to the UK Information Commissioner’s Office (https://ico.org.uk/) or the relevant authority in your country of work or residence;
• the right to withdraw your consent for our use of your information in reliance of your consent (refer to paragraph 4 to see when we are relying on your consent), which you can do by contacting us using any of the details at the top of this Privacy Notice;
• the right to object to our using your information on the basis of our legitimate interests (refer to paragraph 4 above to see when we are relying on our legitimate interests); and
• the right to receive a copy of any information we hold about you in connection with the performance of our contract with you or on the basis of your consent (or request that we transfer this to another service provider) in a structured, commonly-used, machine readable format; and
• the right to ask us to limit or cease processing or erase information we hold about you in certain circumstances.

You may contact us with the details at the top of this Privacy Notice if you wish to action any of these additional rights and we will comply with your requests unless we have a lawful reason not to do so.

Effective Date: 29-Jul-2024
Last Updated: 29-Jul-2024

 

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If you have any questions, queries or concerns about the way that your personal data has been handled, please email the UCL Data Protection team at data-protection@ucl.ac.uk to discuss your concerns.

We may make changes to this Privacy Notice from time to time. We will post any changes to our site, or notify you of any material changes by e-mail.

This notice was last reviewed on 1 July 2024.