Privacy notice

Draft, pending review by counsel. This notice describes what the portal does today. The wording and the periods may change before the first call opens.

Who is responsible

The Open Science Foundation, Matten bei Interlaken, Switzerland, runs this portal and is responsible for the data it holds. The portal is separate from every other system of the foundation. Write to office@opening.science about anything on this page.

What the portal holds, and why

• Your email address, to sign you in with a link and to write to you about your application. An address is stored when a sign-in link is requested.
• The ORCID iD or LinkedIn account you link, and the name on the LinkedIn profile, never its email: one person may support one application per call, and a linked account is how the portal tells people apart.
• Your application: your name, institution, the project texts, your field, experience band and mode, your portfolio link, the conflicts you declare and your declarations. The published rules run on it, and peers read an anonymised part of it (never your name, institution, link or conflicts). What you type is saved as a draft until you submit.
• The reviews you write about other applicants' projects, and the reviews written about yours.
• What happens to your application: the rule results, review scores, adjudicators' decisions and reasons, requests and appeals, an offer and its answer, and a record of who changed what and when.
• Technical traces: your IP address, for rate limits, for about a day; records of the mail sent to you. The portal's logs replace every email address with a one-way digest.

The eligibility rule check uses no AI. The Theoria assessment will: it will send the title and scientific project sections of your proposal (problem, build, openness, workplan, benefit and risks) to AI language model providers (OpenAI and/or Anthropic) and use OpenAlex to search the published literature. Your name, contact details, declarations, portfolio and peer reviews will not be sent. Practice results on your draft will be private to you. What of the official assessment, your response and the reviewing person's reason is published, and for how long it is kept, will be stated here before the assessment starts. Nothing is collected that no rule or reviewer needs.

Who receives it

• Hetzner Online GmbH, in Germany, hosts the portal.
• Resend (Plus Five Five, Inc.), in the United States, sends its mail. The mail leaves from Resend's sending region in Ireland; Resend keeps a copy of each message, and what became of it, for 30 days in the United States.
• ORCID or LinkedIn, when you choose to link an account: you sign in with them, and they tell the portal the iD or the account (and LinkedIn the profile name). Both are based in the United States.
• Theoria and its AI providers, once the Theoria assessment starts: Theoria's service, run for OSF, will receive the title and scientific sections of your proposal; OpenAI and/or Anthropic, in the United States, will receive them to run the language models, and OpenAlex will receive search queries drawn from them. None of them will receive your name or contact details.
• Other applicants see the anonymised part of your application they review; you see only the scores and comments of your own reviews, never who wrote them.
• The public: the draw pool is published as opaque tickets and anchored on Base, a public blockchain, so that anyone can check the draw. A ticket reveals nothing about you by itself and cannot be deleted from the chain. Once fellows are named, the ticket of a fellow can be linked to them.

How long

• A draft is deleted when submissions close if it was never submitted, and a month later otherwise; the submitted version is the record.
• An application that does not lead to a fellowship, with its reviews and decisions, is deleted 12 months after the call's draw, or after the call was voided, once the call is over.
• A fellow's application is kept with the grant file.
• An address that never led to an application is deleted 90 days after its last sign-in.
• Sign-in links, sessions and rate-limit records are deleted within days to a month.
• The published manifest, the draw record and the audit record of decisions are kept; once your application is deleted they no longer name you.

Until counsel confirms these periods, deletions about people are reported and not yet carried out; the technical records above are already deleted on schedule. A backup that is restored does not bring back what was erased: every erasure is recorded in a ledger that is replayed before the portal starts again.

Your rights

You may ask to see the data the portal holds about you, to correct it, to have it erased, or object to its use. An erasure removes your account and everything attached to it, the portal's record of the mail sent to you and your address from every list; the copies our mail sender keeps are deleted when its 30 days have passed. A review you wrote about someone else is kept without your name, so that their result does not change. An erasure is not a ban: you may apply again later with the same address. Write to office@opening.science. You may also complain to the Federal Data Protection and Information Commissioner (FDPIC), or, in the EU, to the data protection authority of your country.

A person, not only a rule

The rule check and the draw are automated. Every automated outcome can be looked at by a person: if a rule rejects your application you can ask for a human review from your status page; you can appeal a review outcome and a forfeited seat; and you can ask a person to look at the draw, or at an offer that expired, from the same page. The answer is given in writing.

If the portal cannot write to you

When mail to an address bounces, the portal stops writing to it. You can still write to office@opening.science from any address; say which address you applied with.

Sources

Institution names come from the Research Organization Registry (ROR), CC0 1.0. Country codes in that data derive from GeoNames, licensed CC BY 4.0.