Privacy policy

What we collect

Account details: your email address, a securely hashed password (or your Google account identity if you sign in with Google), and whether you are a student or a researcher.

Profile details you choose to add: name, university or institution, degree or department, position, bio, research interests, ORCID and Google Scholar link, and a profile photo if you upload one.

A profile photo is optional and appears only if you upload one; otherwise you appear with your initials. Your browser crops and shrinks it before upload, which also removes hidden camera data such as location. We never copy the photo from your Google account. You can change or remove it at any time, and removing it deletes the file.

Activity needed to run the service: collaboration requests and their messages, and basic technical logs (such as IP address and request times) used for security and rate limiting.

How we use it

To run your account, power search and recommendations, deliver collaboration requests, and keep ResearchLink secure.

Your profile text and research interests are turned into numerical vectors so search can match by meaning. When you generate an email draft, the context you type and the researcher's public paper details are sent to an AI provider to write the draft.

What others can see

Anyone, signed in or not, can see a researcher's name, position, institution, department, lab, bio, research interests, photo (if they uploaded one) and papers in search results.

Signed-in members can see full profiles: bio, links and the details above, for students and researchers alike. Students appear in other members' recommendations and on their own profile page.

Your email address, your password and the messages in your collaboration requests are never shown to anyone except the people involved in a request.

Researchers who haven't joined

To help students find the right people, some researcher profiles are created from public publication data in OpenAlex (published under the CC0 licence) before the researcher has an account. They contain the name, institution, research topics and papers listed there, never an email address or contact details.

These profiles are marked as built from public data, and nobody can send them a collaboration request. If one of them is about you, you can claim it by joining as a researcher, or ask us to remove it by writing to research.link11@gmail.com; we remove it and don't recreate it.

Who we share it with

We use service providers to host data, store profile photos and send email (Supabase), to write AI drafts (an LLM provider such as Groq or Google Gemini), and to look up public paper data (OpenAlex). They process data only to provide those services.

We don't sell your personal data, and we don't show advertising.

Cookies

We use essential cookies only: secure, httpOnly cookies that keep you signed in. There are no advertising or tracking cookies.

How long we keep it

We keep your data while your account exists. Unconfirmed sign-ups are deleted automatically after a few days. When you delete your account, your profile and requests are removed.

Your choices

You can view and edit your profile at any time, upload or remove your photo, unlink your OpenAlex author profile (which removes your imported papers), and ask for a copy of your data or for your account to be deleted by writing to research.link11@gmail.com.