Privacy Policy

1. Introduction

ScholarMind ("we," "our," or "us") is committed to protecting your privacy. This Privacy Policy explains how we collect, use, disclose, and safeguard your information when you use our AI-powered research assistant platform located at scholarmind.online.

By using our service, you consent to the data practices described in this policy.

2. Information We Collect

2.1 Personal Information

We collect information you provide directly to us, including:

• Name and email address when you create an account (account creation and authentication are handled by our identity provider, Clerk)
• Profile information and preferences
• Payment and billing information, processed securely by our payment processor, Stripe — we do not store your full card details on our own servers
• Communications with our support team

2.2 Research Content

When you use our AI research tools, we process:

• Documents you upload for analysis
• Text content for processing and analysis
• Generated summaries, citations, and concept maps
• Analysis results and reports

To generate your analysis, the text of your uploaded documents is sent to one or more third-party AI providers for processing — currently Anthropic, OpenAI, and Google. These providers process your content to return the requested analysis to you. We do not use your documents to train our own AI models — we do not have any proprietary AI models of our own. These providers' standard API terms state that data submitted through their business APIs (as opposed to their public consumer chat products) is not used to train their models by default; we encourage you to review Anthropic's, OpenAI's, and Google's own privacy and data-usage policies for full detail. Depending on the feature you use, your search terms or content derived from your uploaded documents may also be sent to public academic databases — Semantic Scholar, PubMed, arXiv, CrossRef, and OpenAlex — to retrieve or enrich results with matching publications.

When you run a reference check, the bibliographic details of each reference in your document (title, authors, year and DOI) are sent to CrossRef and OpenAlex to look up the published record. Only those reference details are sent, not the rest of your document, and they are sent without your name or account information.

2.3 Usage Data

We automatically collect certain information about your use of our service:

• Log data including IP addresses and browser information
• Usage patterns and feature interactions
• Performance and error data
• Device and connection information
• If you allow advertising cookies, how you arrived from and interact with our Google Ads advertisements (see Section 6)

3. How We Use Your Information

We use the collected information for the following purposes:

• Providing and maintaining our AI research services
• Processing and analyzing your research documents
• Improving our own platform, features, and quality-control systems (not the underlying third-party AI models themselves)
• Communicating with you about your account and our services
• Measuring how well our advertising works, if you allow advertising cookies (see Section 6)
• Ensuring security and preventing fraud
• Complying with legal obligations

4. Information Sharing and Disclosure

We do not sell your personal information. We share information with the following categories of service providers, each of which processes it only to provide their specific service to us:

• Authentication: Clerk (account creation, sign-in, and session management)
• Payments: Stripe (billing and subscription management)
• AI processing: Anthropic, OpenAI, and Google (analyzing the documents you submit, as described in Section 2.2)
• Email: Mailjet (account, billing, and analysis-completion notifications)
• Hosting, storage, and analytics: Vercel, including Vercel Blob storage (your uploaded documents and generated files) and Vercel Analytics (aggregate, cookieless usage statistics such as page views)
• Advertising measurement: Google (Google Ads), only if you allow advertising cookies — see Section 6. Your uploaded documents and analysis results are never shared with Google for advertising.
• Reference lookups: CrossRef and OpenAlex (the bibliographic details of references you ask us to check, as described in Section 2.2)
• Legal Requirements: When required by law or to protect our rights and safety
• Business Transfers: In connection with mergers, acquisitions, or asset sales
• Consent: With your explicit consent for specific purposes

5. Data Security

We implement appropriate technical and organizational measures to protect your information:

• Encryption of data in transit and at rest
• Regular security assessments and updates
• Access controls and authentication measures
• Secure data processing and storage practices

6. Cookies

We use three kinds of cookies and similar technologies:

• Strictly necessary: cookies set by our authentication provider, Clerk, to keep you signed in and protect your account. These are always on, because the service doesn't work without them. We also store your cookie choice in your browser so we don't ask again.
• Analytics: Vercel Analytics, which counts page views in aggregate without cookies or persistent identifiers and does not track you across sites.
• Advertising: the Google tag (Google Ads), which lets us measure whether our ads lead to visits and sign-ups. If you allow it, Google may set cookies and receive information such as your IP address, browser details, the pages you visit on our site, and the ad you clicked. Google processes this under its own privacy policy (policies.google.com/privacy); you can learn more at How Google uses information from sites that use its services.

Your choice: the first time you visit, we ask whether you accept advertising cookies. If you are in the European Economic Area, the United Kingdom or Switzerland, advertising cookies stay off unless you accept them. Elsewhere they are on unless you decline. You can change your choice at any time using the "Cookie settings" link at the bottom of every page. You can also manage Google ad personalization at adssettings.google.com.

We do not sell your personal information, and we never use the contents of your documents for advertising.

7. Children's Privacy

Our Service is not directed to, and is not intended for use by, anyone under the age of 18. We do not knowingly collect personal information from children. If you believe a child has provided us with personal information, please contact us at support@scholarmind.online and we will delete it.

8. Data Retention

Uploaded documents and their analysis results are automatically deleted 7 days after upload on our Free plan, and 90 days after upload on our Professional plan. You can choose a shorter retention period in your privacy settings. Account information is retained for as long as your account is active and as necessary to comply with legal obligations. You may request deletion of your account and associated data at any time by contacting us at support@scholarmind.online.

9. Your Rights

Depending on your location, you may have the following rights:

• Access and update your personal information
• Request deletion of your data
• Withdraw consent for data processing
• Request data portability
• Object to certain data processing activities, including advertising measurement (use "Cookie settings" at the bottom of any page)

10. Contact Us

If you have any questions about this Privacy Policy or our data practices, please contact us:

11. Policy Updates

We may update this Privacy Policy from time to time. We will notify you of any material changes by posting the updated policy on our website and updating the "Last updated" date. Your continued use of our service after such changes constitutes acceptance of the updated policy.