Privacy Policy

Our policies apply to this website address : https://www.raisetheflag.ca

Comments

When visitors leave comments on the site we collect the data shown in the comments form, and also the visitor’s IP address and browser user agent string to help spam detection.

If you want to submit a public comment on our website, we will ask for the following information: email,  and  display name. Your display name,  will be made public along with your comment. If you request that your account be deleted, your comment will remain on our website but your display name will no longer be associated with your comment.

If you register on a RaiseTheFlag.ca Site, we will gather and store your username and password to identify you at sign-in and to administer your account.

If we send you email with links then we will gather and store the information about the links that you click on in order to track the effectiveness of our communications.

Additionally, RaiseTheFlag.ca may process some basic personal information about you (email address, name and research interest) that is publicly available to register you as a potential reviewer and expert or to contact you about publishing with RaiseTheFlag.ca on a particular topic. If you do not wish to be contacted as a potential reviewer or for possible publication with RaiseTheFlag.ca, you can email us at info@RaiseTheFlag.ca . We will keep some of your personal information to recall your request not to be contacted in the future.

Finally, we may collect demographic information about you, such as gender and ethnic origin. We usually collect and use this information on an anonymized basis. If you provide demographic information to RaiseTheFlag.ca , you do so voluntarily and RaiseTheFlag.ca will collect, store and use your demographic information in accordance with this privacy policy.

An anonymized string created from your email address (also called a hash) may be provided to the Gravatar service to see if you are using it. The Gravatar service privacy policy is available here: https://automattic.com/privacy/. After approval of your comment, your profile picture is visible to the public in the context of your comment.

Affiliate Discolsure


RaiseTheFlag.ca is a participant in the Amazon Services LLC Associates Program, an affiliate advertising program designed to provide a means for sites to earn advertising fees by advertising and linking to amazon.com. Content that appears on this site comes from Amazon Services LLC. This content is Provided ‘AS IS’ and is subject to change or removal at any time.

If you register on a RaiseTheFlag.ca Site for updates or to receive other types of notifications from us, we will ask for your email address to enable us to send you the information you have requested.

Media

 If you upload images to the website, you should avoid uploading images with embedded location data (EXIF GPS) included. Visitors to the website can download and extract any location data from images on the website.

Cookies

If you leave a comment on our site you may opt-in to saving your name, email address and website in cookies. These are for your convenience so that you do not have to fill in your details again when you leave another comment. These cookies will last for one year.

If you visit our login page, we will set a temporary cookie to determine if your browser accepts cookies. This cookie contains no personal data and is discarded when you close your browser.

When you log in, we will also set up several cookies to save your login information and your screen display choices. Login cookies last for two days, and screen options cookies last for a year. If you select “Remember Me”, your login will persist for two weeks. If you log out of your account, the login cookies will be removed.

If you edit or publish an article, an additional cookie will be saved in your browser. This cookie includes no personal data and simply indicates the post ID of the article you just edited. It expires after 1 day.

Embedded content from other websites

 Articles on this site may include embedded content (e.g. videos, images, articles, etc.). Embedded content from other websites behaves in the exact same way as if the visitor has visited the other website.

These websites may collect data about you, use cookies, embed additional third-party tracking, and monitor your interaction with that embedded content, including tracking your interaction with the embedded content if you have an account and are logged in to that website.

Who we share your data with

 If you request a password reset, your IP address will be included in the reset email.

How long we retain your data

If you leave a comment, the comment and its metadata are retained indefinitely. This is so we can recognize and approve any follow-up comments automatically instead of holding them in a moderation queue.

For users that register on our website (if any), we also store the personal information they provide in their user profile. All users can see, edit, or delete their personal information at any time (except they cannot change their username). Website administrators can also see and edit that information.

What rights you have over your data

If you have an account on this site, or have left comments, you can request to receive an exported file of the personal data we hold about you, including any data you have provided to us. You can also request that we erase any personal data we hold about you. This does not include any data we are obliged to keep for administrative, legal, or security purposes.

Where your data is sent

 Visitor comments may be checked through an automated spam detection service.

Technical Information


By generally visiting or otherwise interacting with the RaiseTheFlag.ca Sites, we collect, have access to, store and use your computer’s IP address, the URL/domain name of any referring website, the time and date of your visit to the RaiseTheFlag.ca Sites, and certain information known as “clickstream data” to enable us to understand how people interact with the RaiseTheFlag.ca Sites, to analyze data for trends and statistics, to help diagnose and solve issues with the RaiseTheFlag.ca Sites and our technologies, products, and services, and to optimize the performance of the RaiseTheFlag.ca Sites. We use click view data to provide statistics on articles such as number of views and downloads. We also use session cookies, as described below. From time to time, we use software tools to play back user sessions for our internal use in assessing our customers’ interactions with our software, and these sessions may be linked to your user account. When we send you an email which contains personalized links then we will gather and store your name, email, and any link you click on, when you click on the links in order to track the effectiveness of our communications.

Cookies and Other Tracking Technologies


We and our third party providers use cookies and other tracking technologies to collect information. For more detailed information about the cookies and other tracking technologies we use, why we use them, the basis for using them, and your choices, see our Cookie Policy.

Children’s Privacy
Use of the RaiseTheFlag.ca Sites is intended for adults at least eighteen (18) years of age and we do not knowingly collect personally-identifying information from children under the age of thirteen (13).

HOW WE USE AND DISCLOSE YOUR INFORMATION


RaiseTheFlag.ca uses your personal information as described in the “INFORMATION WE COLLECT” section, to customize your experience on the RaiseTheFlag.ca Sites and facilitate our interactions with you.

If you are an author, we use your personal information for the purpose of processing, reviewing, communicating about, facilitating editorial review and peer review, for publishing, and to facilitate payment of article publishing fees.

If you are an editor or reviewer, we use your personal information to contact you about your potential or actual role as an editor or reviewer, to request and facilitate your review and handling of manuscripts, and to update you on news and developments at RaiseTheFlag.ca as it may affect your work with us.

If an author chooses to publish their peer review history, we make the manuscript review process available to the public when an article is published, including the contents of emails and other communications between reviewers, editors and authors via a RaiseTheFlag.ca Site.

If you write a blog for the RaiseTheFlag.ca blog, your name and biography (as provided by you) will be made public.

We may also use your personal information to assist with improving the peer review system and scientific communication, as part of RaiseTheFlag.ca ’s ongoing research program on the processes we use in the course of manuscript handling.

If you provide demographic information to RaiseTheFlag.ca as described in the “INFORMATION WE COLLECT” section above, then we usually collect and use this information on an anonymized basis so that you will not be identified from it unless we tell you otherwise. We will use that information only for internal diversity tracking purposes.

If you simply visit RaiseTheFlag.ca Sites to read content, we will use information such as your URL and cookies to provide a good experience, as described in the “INFORMATION WE COLLECT” section.

We may also collect your name, email, address and phone number at conferences or events.

Disclosure to Third Parties

If you submit a manuscript or other research content to us for possible publication, we will send the title and abstract of your manuscript, and your name, to one or more potential external/volunteer editors and reviewers to gauge their interest in reviewing your content. If they agree to review your content, we will send them your full manuscript and any revisions and relevant comments you have provided. If your manuscript is accepted for publication, we share information about you, your manuscript, or other research content as reasonably necessary with volunteer curators and channel managers. In addition to volunteer curators and channel managers, we may share the foregoing information with journalists prior to publication for the purpose of promoting your work.

If you choose to publish your manuscript as a preprint, we send your manuscript to our preprint partner(s) for posting of your manuscript.

If a paper is published or posted as a preprint, the following information appears as part of the paper: author’s name, role, email address, affiliation, ORCID iD, any competing interests, editor’s name, and affiliation. The foregoing information will also be included in the article XML and syndicated to third parties. If you are a reviewer that has voluntarily provided an ORCID iD to RaiseTheFlag.ca and choose to participate in the ORCID reviewer recognition, we will share general information about your review with your ORCID record, such as the year your review was completed and type of review.

If an author chooses to publish their peer review history, then the contents of emails and other communications between reviewers, editors and authors via a RaiseTheFlag.ca Site will be made public. If you are a reviewer and provide us with your consent, we will disclose your name as part of the peer review history when an article is published and the author has chosen to publish the peer review history. To remove your name from the peer review history after disclosure to the public, you can email info@RaiseTheFlag.ca .

We may also disclose personal information as reasonably necessary for the purposes described in this privacy policy to other third parties, as follows:

Vendors, independent contractors, and consultants to enable us to provide products and services, such as financial institutions (for facilitating payment of fees owed), web and technical support providers (such as hosting providers and customer service and support providers), and third parties who provide syndication and preprints
Institutions or consortia, to facilitate payment of publishing fees on the author’s behalf, if applicable
Third party workflow service intermediaries, to facilitate the performance of contractual obligations between RaiseTheFlag.ca and institutions or consortia, as applicable
Other publishers
Third parties authorized by you to receive such information, such as third parties that facilitate the automatic update of your ORCID record.
To respond to claims asserted against us or comply with legal process (e.g., subpoenas or warrants), or lawful requests from government or law enforcement authorities (as required to meet national security or law enforcement requirements), and to enforce or comply with our agreements, terms of use, and this privacy policy
Academic research groups and third-party providers of tools or services that help inform RaiseTheFlag.ca how to improve the peer review system and scientific communication
To comply with applicable law, or as required or permitted by law
Where it is in our legitimate interests, under relevant law, to run, grow and develop our organization in order to expand the impact of science and medicine
If we sell any business or assets, we may disclose your personal information to the buyer of such business or assets
If substantially all of our or any of our affiliates’ assets are acquired by a third party, in which case personal information held by us will be one of the transferred assets
To protect the safety of any person or to prevent any illegal activity
To protect the rights, property, or safety of RaiseTheFlag.ca , our staff, our users or other persons. This may include exchanging personal information with other organizations for the purposes of fraud protection and credit risk reduction
Author’s institution and/or ethics committee and other third parties, as appropriate, where we have identified a failure to comply with our publishing standards and guidelines or to uphold the integrity of research in cases of suspected research integrity breaches
In some cases, the applications or user interfaces you encounter while on our sites are managed by third parties, who may require that you provide your personal information. We are not responsible for the privacy practices of these third party services or applications. We recommend carefully reviewing the user terms and privacy statement of each third party service, website, and/or application prior to use.

RaiseTheFlag.ca will never disclose demographic information, described in the “INFORMATION WE COLLECT” section above, to third parties, unless it has been anonymized or otherwise deidentified.

No Sale or Leasing of Your Information

Except as described in the “Disclosure to Third Parties” section of this privacy policy, we will not disclose your personal information to third parties without your consent. We will not sell or lease your personal information to any third party. We may disclose aggregate demographic and statistical information with our business partners; this information is not specific to the identification of you as an individual.

HOW LONG WE RETAIN YOUR INFORMATION
We keep your personal information for as long as is necessary to provide services to you, and for as long as your account and/or registration with RaiseTheFlag.ca is active. We will retain and use your information as necessary to comply with our legal obligations, to resolve disputes, and to enforce our agreements.

Requests to delete, amend or withdraw consent – non-EEA or UK residents
You may be entitled to request that we delete or amend your personal information. You may also be entitled to withdraw your consent, when consent is the basis for processing your personal information. We apply the same procedures, limitations and exceptions established for European Economic Area (EEA) and UK residents in this privacy policy to all who make such request to delete or amend personal information, or withdraw consent for processing personal information, regardless of geographic location. Please read the “Your Rights” paragraph under the “ADDITIONAL TERMS FOR EUROPEAN ECONOMIC AREA AND UK RESIDENTS” below for details. If you are a resident of the EEA or UK, see below for more specific details on how that applies to you.

PROTECTION OF PERSONAL INFORMATION
We use reasonable and appropriate physical, technical, and administrative safeguards to protect your information from unauthorized use, access, loss, misuse, alteration, or destruction. We endeavor to protect the personal information we receive, gather and store, by such means as password protection, firewalls and other means. We also require that third party service providers acting on our behalf or with whom we share your information also provide appropriate security measures in accordance with industry standards.

Transmissions over the internet are never entirely secure and we cannot guarantee the security of information you submit via a RaiseTheFlag.ca Site while it is in transit over the internet. Any such transmission of information by you over the internet is at your own risk.

THIRD PARTY WEBSITES
If, in your interactions with the RaiseTheFlag.ca Sites, you are linked or directed to, or click on, a third party website, we cannot control what information you may provide to that party or on/at that website, and are not responsible for how that party may use or disclose any information you may provide to them. As such, we urge that you exercise caution before providing them with your personal information and to review the third party’s privacy policy for information on its data processing practice.

SENDING YOU EMAIL COMMUNICATIONS
Except in countries or jurisdictions where it is not be permitted by law, we may from time to time send you email communications regarding our business, products or services in response to your use of the RaiseTheFlag.ca Sites.

For UK and EEA recipients, RaiseTheFlag.ca ’ legal basis for using your information to send email communications is our legitimate interests to run, grow and develop our organization in order to expand the impact of science and medicine and spread knowledge in this field. We describe our legitimate interests in more detail under the “Legal Basis for your information” section below. Email communications will be sent on an opt out basis to any recipient who has registered or signed up for RaiseTheFlag.ca services and did not opt out.

Where required by law, we may process your personal information for marketing purposes on the basis of your consent.

You can opt out of receiving such communications at any time by using the unsubscribe link(s) in emails we send you or by emailing us at info@RaiseTheFlag.ca .

You can opt out of receiving such communications by using the unsubscribe link(s) in emails we send you or by emailing us at info@RaiseTheFlag.ca .

CHANGES TO THIS PRIVACY POLICY
RaiseTheFlag.ca may make changes to this privacy policy from time to time. Changes to this privacy policy will be made by updating this page. Please visit this privacy policy regularly to read the current version. If there are material changes to how we use your personal information, we will endeavor to provide you with reasonable notice of such changes, either by prominent notice on www.RaiseTheFlag.ca or to your email address of record.

Cross Border Transfers
RaiseTheFlag.ca is headquartered in Canada, with service providers both in Canada, the United States and throughout the world. As such, RaiseTheFlag.ca and our service providers may transfer your personal information to, or access it in, jurisdictions that may not provide equivalent levels of data protection as your home jurisdiction. RaiseTheFlag.ca will take measures to protect the cross-border transfer of your information in accordance with applicable law.

If you do not want your personal information transferred to Canada, please do not submit any information to us or use our services. When RaiseTheFlag.ca transfers information about individuals based in the EEA or UK outside of those countries, we will take appropriate measures to safeguard the transfer as required by applicable law, including by using of European Commission-approved standard contractual data protection clauses or following an adequacy decision by the EU Commission and equivalent provisions under applicable UK law.

If you do not want your personal information transferred to the Canada, please do not submit any information to us or use our services. When RaiseTheFlag.ca transfers information about European Union citizens outside the European Economic Area, we safeguard the transfer by using of European Commission-approved standard contractual data protection clauses or following an adequacy decision by the EU Commission.

ADDITIONAL TERMS FOR EUROPEAN ECONOMIC AREA AND UK RESIDENTS
If you reside within the European Economic Area or United Kingdom, the following additional terms apply.

Legal Basis for Use of Your Information
The information we require, as identified in the “INFORMATION WE COLLECT” section of this privacy policy, is processed under the following legal basis:

RaiseTheFlag.ca ’s legitimate interests.

This includes:

  • to enable RaiseTheFlag.ca to provide our products and services to you
  • finding and contacting qualified reviewers to ensure the high level of articles published in a RaiseTheFlag.ca journal, as applicable
  • contacting authors and other academics to ensure they are aware when RaiseTheFlag.ca is calling for papers for relevant journals
  • to ensure compliance with publishing standards and ethical guidelines and to take action necessary to uphold these
  • for marketing to individuals at businesses/corporate addresses and to our subscribers, market research and business development
  • for analytics, to gather metrics to better understand how users use the RaiseTheFlag.ca Sites, to evaluate and improve the RaiseTheFlag.ca Sites, and to provide RaiseTheFlag.ca ’ users with this information, where applicable
  • to provide information on RaiseTheFlag.ca publication fees and other relevant terms with institutions or consortia, where applicable
  • to prevent fraud and other illegal activity
  • the legitimate interests of others (for example, to ensure the security of our website)
  • to comply with legal obligations, as part of our general business operations, and for other internal business administration purposes
  • if we collect demographic information from you (such as gender and ethnic origin) in order to carry out diversity monitoring and such information is not collected in an anonymous format,
  • then we rely on our legitimate interest to do so.
  • Contractual obligations. For the performance of contractual obligations between you and RaiseTheFlag.ca , including the RaiseTheFlag.ca Terms of Use.

Consent. Where required by law, we may process your personal information in some cases for marketing purposes on the basis of your consent (which you may withdraw at any time after giving it, as described in this privacy policy). Otherwise, email communication will be sent on an opt out basis to any recipient who has registered or signed up to RaiseTheFlag.ca services and did not opt out.

Your Rights


Deletion of Personal Information
You may be entitled to request that we delete your personal information in certain specific circumstances. If you wish to exercise this right, please submit your request at info@RaiseTheFlag.ca .

If you are an author and have submitted a manuscript or other research outputs to RaiseTheFlag.ca , or you are an editor or reviewer that has reviewed manuscripts or other research outputs submitted to RaiseTheFlag.ca , some of your personal data will be retained as necessary for RaiseTheFlag.ca to establish, exercise or defend a legal claim; for archiving scientific research; and for exercising the right of freedom of expression and information. We may retain your personal data for the purposes of preserving RaiseTheFlag.ca publishing standards and ethical guidelines, which authors are made aware of before submission of any manuscript or other research output. Such personal data includes your name, institutional affiliation, title and email address.

If your article has been published or posted as a preprint, the following additional personal data will be retained for purposes of archiving scientific research: author’s role, ORCID iD, and any competing interests.

We will consider all such requests and provide our response within a reasonable period (but no longer than one calendar month from our receipt of your request unless we tell you that we are entitled to a longer period under applicable law). We may require you to verify your identity before we respond to your request. Certain personal information may be exempt from such requests in certain circumstances, including as provided for in this privacy policy.

Access, Update, Data Portability and Other Rights
You may also be entitled to access your information, update your personal information which is out of date or incorrect, restrict use of your personal information in certain specific circumstances, place a data portability request (applicable only when we use your personal information on the basis of your consent or performance of a contract, and where our use of your information is carried out by automated means), and ask us to consider any valid objections which you have to our use of your personal information where we process it on the basis of our or another person’s legitimate interest. Requests should be directed to info@RaiseTheFlag.ca .

We will consider all such requests and provide our response within a reasonable period (but no longer than one calendar month from our receipt of your request unless we tell you we are entitled to a longer period under applicable law). We may require you to verify your identity before we respond to any of your requests. Certain personal information may be exempt from such requests in certain circumstances, including as provided for in this privacy policy.

Complaints
You also have the right to lodge a complaint before a supervisory data protection authority regarding our data processing.

If you are in Europe, an up to date list of data protection authorities is available at https://edpb.europa.eu/about-edpb/board/members_en. If you are in the UK, the data protection authority is the UK Information Commissioner’s Office available at https://ico.org.uk/.

HOW TO CONTACT US REGARDING YOUR PERSONAL INFORMATION
If you have any questions about this privacy policy, you may contact us at info@raisetheflag.ca


Email address
RaiseTheFlag.ca will use your email address to provide news and updates. You can find out more about how RaiseTheFlag.ca processes your data by reading our Privacy Policy. You can unsubscribe at any time by clicking the unsubscribe link in our emails or by contacting us at info@RaiseTheFlag.ca .

Privacy Policy

Your privacy is very important to us. Accordingly, we have developed this Policy in order for you to understand how we collect, use, communicate and disclose and make use of personal information. The following outlines our privacy policy.

Before or at the time of collecting personal information, we will identify the purposes for which information is being collected.
We will collect and use of personal information solely with the objective of fulfilling those purposes specified by us and for other compatible purposes, unless we obtain the consent of the individual concerned or as required by law.
We will only retain personal information as long as necessary for the fulfillment of those purposes.
We will collect personal information by lawful and fair means and, where appropriate, with the knowledge or consent of the individual concerned.
Personal data should be relevant to the purposes for which it is to be used, and, to the extent necessary for those purposes, should be accurate, complete, and up-to-date.
We will protect personal information by reasonable security safeguards against loss or theft, as well as unauthorized access, disclosure, copying, use or modification.
We will make readily available to customers information about our policies and practices relating to the management of personal information.

We are committed to conducting our business in accordance with these principles in order to ensure that the confidentiality of personal information is protected and maintained.

Information that is gathered from visitors

In common with other websites, log files are stored on the web server saving details such as the visitor’s IP address, browser type, referring page and time of visit.

Cookies may be used to remember visitor preferences when interacting with the website.

Where registration is required, the visitor’s email and a username will be stored on the server.
How the Information is used

The information is used to enhance the visitor’s experience when using the website to display personalized content and possibly advertising.

E-mail addresses will not be sold, rented or leased to 3rd parties.

E-mail may be sent to inform you of news of our services or offers by us or our affiliates.
Visitor Options

If you have subscribed to one of our services, you may unsubscribe by following the instructions which are included in e-mail that you receive.

You may be able to block cookies via your browser settings but this may prevent you from access to certain features of the website.
Cookies

Cookies are small digital signature files that are stored by your web browser that allow your preferences to be recorded when visiting the website. Also they may be used to track your return visits to the website.

3rd party advertising companies may also use cookies for tracking purposes.
Google Ads

Google, as a third party vendor, uses cookies to serve ads.

Google’s use of the DART cookie enables it to serve ads to visitors based on their visit to sites they visit on the Internet.

Website visitors may opt out of the use of the DART cookie by visiting the Google ad and content network privacy policy.

RaiseTheFlag.ca is a participant in the Amazon Services LLC Associates Program, an affiliate advertising program designed to provide a means for sites to earn advertising fees by advertising and linking to amazon.com. Content that appears on this site comes from Amazon Services LLC. This content is Provided ‘AS IS’ and is subject to change or removal at any time.