Privacy policy

• Account details — your email address, first and last name, and optional institution and research field.
• Research content — projects, notebook pages, literature sources, records, tasks, evidence matrix entries and uploaded files.
• Preferences — theme, citation style, guidance level, date format and notification choices.
• Billing records — plan tier, status, billing period and the identifiers our payment processor issues. Card numbers never reach our servers.
• Activity — a log of actions inside your own projects, so you have an audit trail of research decisions.

We do not run advertising trackers, and we do not build behavioural profiles of you across other sites.

To provide the service you asked for (contract), to bill correctly and meet tax and accounting duties (legal obligation), and to keep the service secure and working (legitimate interest). Where we rely on consent — such as optional product emails — you can withdraw it at any time in Settings.

Perspectives Plus Research LLC uses the following subprocessors. This list reflects the integrations actually present in the product.

What is sent when you search, in the same words shown on the Discover sources page:

• A search only happens when you press Search. Opening the page sends nothing.
• Only the search text and the filters you selected are sent to the named catalogues: Crossref, OpenAlex, PubMed, DOAJ, DataCite, Semantic Scholar, Open Library and, when each is enabled for this service, CORE, Google Books and Europeana.
• To find free copies, the DOIs of returned results (not your search text) are checked with Unpaywall.
• Your name, email, account identifier, project notes, drafts and attachments are never sent.
• Results are scored inside Research Notebook; the Relevance Rate is calculated here, not by the catalogues.

What the AI assistant does with your text, in the same words shown next to the composer:

• Each request carries the app's own system and task instructions, the project context you selected (its title, field and research approach, plus any notebook pages or literature notes you ticked), up to the last eight messages of the current conversation, and the question you just typed. Your name, email, billing details and unselected projects are not included.
• Operational records of every request — status, model, token counts, cost and duration — are always kept. Full request and response content may be retained for up to 90 days where gateway debugging visibility is enabled, and Google documents retention of up to 55 days for abuse monitoring unless a project-specific zero-data-retention arrangement applies, which is not confirmed for this deployment. Content flagged by safety systems may be reviewed by authorised provider personnel.
• Content sent through the paid service is not used to train general models by default. That is not the same as zero retention, and optional logging, evaluation datasets, feedback submissions or sharing settings can change how content is handled.
• Our hosting, database, gateway and model providers, and authorised operators acting under logged support access, can technically reach data where required for hosting, security, support or legal compliance.
• Do not submit identifiable participant information, embargoed material or third-party content you are not free to share externally.
• You remain responsible for ethics approval, IRB conditions, participant consent and your institution's data-management requirements when you use the assistant.
• Answers can be wrong or invented, including citations that look real. Treat them as a prompt for your own thinking, never as a citable source.

The payment processor receives your email and billing details directly; we receive only subscription state. The AI provider receives only the text you explicitly send to the assistant — see the research data statement. We do not authorise any of these providers to use your research content for their own purposes or to train models. Each provider operates under its own published terms and data processing addendum; where you need a signed agreement or specific transfer safeguards for your institution, write to share@perspectivesplus.org and we will tell you what we can and cannot commit to.

Every table that holds your content is protected by row-level security keyed to your account, so one account cannot read another's rows. Files live in a private bucket reachable only through short-lived signed links issued to you.

Our staff do not browse your research content. If a support request cannot be resolved any other way, you can grant time-limited support access from Settings, giving a reason and a duration of up to seven days. Access expires by itself, you can withdraw it at any moment, and every action taken under it is written to your access history and activity log.

User data may be processed and stored in the United States and, where necessary to provide the service, in other jurisdictions where our authorized infrastructure, hosting, payment, authentication, analytics, or service providers operate. We require service providers to handle personal data in accordance with applicable privacy and data protection laws and appropriate contractual safeguards.

We describe residency only as far as our providers document it. We do not currently offer a region-locked deployment, and we will not claim transfer safeguards we cannot evidence.

Research content is kept while your account exists. Items you move to Trash are removed permanently when you empty it. When you delete your account, your content and files are erased and any active subscription is cancelled.

Deletion is processed in stages and completes within 3 days, after which residual copies in operational backups age out on their normal cycle. Billing records are retained for as long as tax law requires, without your research content attached.

You can export everything in your account as JSON at any time from Settings, correct your details in your profile, and delete your account permanently. Depending on where you live you may also have rights to restrict or object to processing, or to complain to your data protection authority. Write to share@perspectivesplus.org and we will respond within 30 days.

We set no advertising cookies and run no cross-site trackers. The entries below are what the product and its infrastructure actually place in your browser.

Our hosting platform records aggregate usage of the site and Cloudflare sets a security cookie to keep automated abuse out. Neither is used for advertising or profiling. Blocking them in your browser may sign you out or degrade protection, but will not stop you using your notebook.