Privacy Policy
This page explains what ScholarIQ collects, why, and who else sees it. Plain language, no legalese. If something here is unclear, email us and we will fix the wording.
Last updated: 6 August 2026
Who we are
ScholarIQ (scholariq.org) is a product of PICO Portal. It publishes public research metadata and links it together so it can be browsed.
The research record data itself comes from public scholarly metadata sources, principally OpenAlex. It is not personal data we collected about you.
What we collect
1. When you create an account
We use BetterAuth for sign-in. Depending on how you sign up, we store:
- your email address and a password hash, or
We also store sessions, email-verification tokens, and — if you connect ScholarIQ to another tool over our OAuth/MCP endpoint — the client registration for that tool.
We do not buy or run third-party "enrichment" on your email. No Apollo, no Clearbit, nothing similar. What you give us is what we have.
2. Email
We send email through Resend — sign-in and workspace-invite messages. We do not embed tracking pixels or redirect links in them.
We have no one-click unsubscribe link today. To stop hearing from us, reply to any message or email hello@scholariq.org and we take you off the list by hand.
Who else sees your data
These are the companies that process data on our behalf:
| Company | What it handles |
|---|---|
| Amazon Web Services (us-east-1) | Hosting, CDN and database |
We do not sell your personal data and we do not share it with advertisers or data brokers.
Cookies
We use cookies for two things:
- Keeping you signed in.
That's it. No advertising cookies. You can block cookies in your browser; sign-in will stop working if you do.
Company names and logos
We name real organisations in our marketing, since the underlying data is public. If you want your organisation's name or logo removed from our marketing material, email us. The rules for this are in the "Use of your name and logo in our marketing" section of our Terms & Conditions.
How long we keep things
- Account and product data — while your account exists, then deleted within 30 days of you closing it.
- Anonymous, aggregated counts (e.g. "how many searches ran last month") — kept indefinitely. These cannot be traced back to you.
Your rights
You can ask us to:
- Show you everything we hold about you
- Correct anything wrong
- Delete your account and data
- Export your data in a machine-readable file
- Stop emailing you — reply to any message from us, or email the address below, and we take you off the list
Email hello@scholariq.org. We reply within 30 days. We do not require a lawyer's letter or a specific format — just tell us what you want.
All of these are manual today: you email us and a human does it. There is no self-serve account-deletion or data-export button.
Security
Passwords are hashed. Traffic runs over HTTPS. Database access is limited to the people who need it.
We are not going to claim certifications we do not hold. We have no SOC 2 report and no ISO certification today. If that matters for your procurement process, ask us and we'll tell you exactly where we stand.
Children
ScholarIQ is a business tool. It is not for anyone under 16, and we do not knowingly collect their data.
Where data lives
The site is served from Amazon S3 and CloudFront, and the corpus is stored in Amazon RDS, all in AWS's us-east-1 region in the United States. If you are in the EU or UK, data you send us will be processed in the United States.
Changes to this page
If we change how we handle data, we update this page and change the "Last updated" date. For changes that meaningfully affect you, we email account holders.
Contact
Tell us what you need. A plain email is enough.