Introduction

BioEnergetics Inc., provides the services made available at bioenergeticsinstitute.org and all other websites operated by BioEnergetics Inc. and all associated applications, including mobile applications, and services ("Service”).

 

BioEnergetics Inc., mission is to connect the world of science and medicine and make information open to all. Openness can only be achieved with comprehensive accessibility. We also gather information from external sources, in order to disseminate as much relevant scientific content as possible to drive medical science forward. Any natural or legal person who, as a recipient of the Service, accesses or uses the Service for any purpose is a User ("User", "you"). Our registered Users ("Members") can, by way of example, and not as a limitation, share their professional identities, credentials, awarded grants, display their academic publications, engage and collaborate with their networks, exchange knowledge and professional insights, contact or be contacted by other Users.

 

Information we process and how we process it

• Basic data processed
  Certain data will be processed when you access the Service, to resolve the technical request of your device, display the site and maintain the safety and security of our systems. This data is stored in so-called logs and comprise the following:
• IP addresses and your mobile device's Identifier for Advertising (IDFA);
• the type of computer or mobile device you are using including operating system and version;
• the types of browser you are using, the language, and your country;
• referring and exit pages and URLs;
• platform type;
• the number of clicks on a page or feature, pages viewed and the order of those pages, the amount of time spent on particular pages or parts of pages;
• domain names and;
• information collected for performance purposes (e.g. average load, render time of pages, etc.).
  All of our pages are secured using SSL (Secure Socket Layer) technology, which encrypts data transmitted between our servers and your end devices. We also apply other suitable technical and organizational measures to protect your personal data.
• Personal data we process
  In order to provide you with functionalities, we need to process certain data and/or information relating to you:
• Registration and maintenance of your Member account
  If you choose to create a Member account on our Service, you will be required, during the registration process, to provide your first and last name, an email address, and a password. You will receive a confirmation email. Your Member account will be confirmed after you have clicked on the respective link in the account activation email. You may also be invited to associate certain information we present to you with your account, such as articles, institutional affiliation, and biographical information.
• Other personal data
  During the registration process or when updating your profile, you can choose to provide other information that can be used to identify and/or contact you, including for example, a profile picture, your Twitter account handle or your city of residence. You may also be invited or required to provide information about you, including, for example, demographic information, such as occupation, and research vita, education, authorship of articles, academic or research expertise or interests, conferences you have attended, groups of which you are a member, information regarding your professional and academic career, academic degree, your previous roles and jobs, and current activities and interests.
• Communications with us
  When you communicate with us, you may provide us with your name, contact details, and other personal data as part of your communication, as well as the content of your message itself. Similarly, when we communicate with you, we will process your personal information, such as your email address. For some of our emails, we also process information indicating whether you have opened the email.
• Communications through the Service
  Many communications that you initiate through our Service (e.g. invitation sent to a non-Member) will list your name in the header of the message. Other communications that you initiate through the Service, like a request for a full-text, will list your name as the initiator but will not include your personal email address. Once you have mutually connected with an individual, contact information you choose to include in your researcher profile will be accessible by that individual.
• Third-party providers
  When you choose to benefit from a service or offer presented by BioEnergetics Inc. on behalf of a third party, you may share personal data with BioEnergetics Inc. to enable us to pass it on to the third party. The nature of personal data will depend on the particular service or offer, but might include your name, email address and affiliation. We do not share any of this personal data with any third party unless you explicitly allow us to do so.
• Paid Products and payment data
  If you choose to purchase a product, service or subscription from BioEnergetics Inc. that is subject to a fee (“Paid Product”), there are two alternatives regarding processing of personal data. Either we will process the personal data to complete your order, or our Merchant of Record (“MoR”) will. If, for a Paid Product, our MoR conducts the ordering flow and processes personal data, we will clearly indicate this prior to starting the ordering process and within the ordering process itself. In each case:
1. If BioEnergetics Inc. is conducting the order: we will process the personal data that you provide in order to complete your order, such as your billing address. BioEnergetics Inc. does not process any credit card information, however we do retain your name and address so we may generate and send you an invoice. Credit card information is collected and processed by a third-party provider, namely Stripe. Stripe processes this data as an independent controller to process the payment. For details about the data processing undertaken by Stripe, please see its Privacy Policy.
• Security
  We process the number of profile pages users view to detect and prevent data harvesting. We also process your IP address to filter out suspicious requests. If you are a Member, we store your full IP address in connection with your account registration request and your current last login. Otherwise, your login activities are only stored in connection with your truncated IP addresses. Also, we process information about your device, its operating system and the browser you are using for your current session.
• Statistics
  We use activity data, such as number of read publications, projects and number of citations, to generate statistics, which pertain to reading behavior or achievements. For example, we may use such activity data in order to calculate and display a read count on an individual publication page.

3. How we use data we collect about you

The following explanations will provide you with information about how we use the personal data that we collect about you, to provide and improve our Service;

• to perform internal quality checks;
• to prevent, detect, process and investigate malfunctions, incidents, fraudulent or other illegal activities, or mitigate the risk of occurrence of the aforementioned events;
• to ensure network and information security;
• to create statistics on access channels and the use of our Service;
• to contact you, if requested by you or if necessary to fulfill the contract or permitted by law;
• to enforce obligations owed to us, and contractual terms and conditions; and
• for accounting, risk management and record keeping purposes.

More specifically, we may use your data for the following purposes.

• BioEnergetics Inc. account
  The personal data you provide in connection with registering for your Member account will be used to create, maintain, and secure your account. By creating a Member account, you will benefit from functionalities and services that are not available to Visitors. Any personal data you provide in addition to the required data to register for an account, will facilitate your ability to get into contact with other Members, promote yourself and your research, and receive more relevant recommendations from our recommendation services. Your BioEnergetics Inc. account is generally visible to every other Member, but you can determine the level of detail you want to share with other Members, e.g. in your Privacy settings and by choosing how much information you add to your profile. Your account can also be found by other Members using our search functionalities and may be recommended to them via our recommendation features. Your choices regarding the details you want to share with other Members will also be respected in such features. You can also determine whether your account is publicly visible to Visitors (and therefore subject to being indexed by search engines). In cases where you purchase a Paid Product and an account is required to make such purchase, we will associate your account with information about your purchase to be able to administrate your purchases, provide you with according support, and allow and revoke your access to the Paid Products.
• Communications
  Depending on the way you are communicating with us, we may use your name, email address, telephone number, and the content of your previous correspondence to respond to you and provide assistance.
• Transactional emails
  Provided you have not opted out from receiving transactional emails from us, we will use your email address to send you emails about relevant developments on the Service concerning for example, your network, new features, publications, projects, updates from the Q&A section, and emails regarding your professional career.
  You can opt out from receiving transactional emails at any time by clicking the "unsubscribe" link within an email or by visiting your account settings.
• Sponsored emails
  Where you have provided your prior consent to receiving sponsored emails, we will use your email address to send you such emails. Where legally allowed, we will also use your email address to send you sponsored emails without your prior consent.
  In any case, you can opt out from receiving sponsored emails at any time by clicking the "unsubscribe" link within an email or visiting the " email settings" in your account..
• Offer Members internal activity insights
  Your interaction with and interest in other Members’ is as valuable to them as it is to you.
• Offer Members external activity insights
  Where Members choose to benefit from receiving external activity insights, we might provide them with additional information such as consumption, mentions, news coverage etc. relating to their profile and work on the Service. To do so, we may associate aggregated and anonymous information we gather from outside BioEnergetics Inc. with your work, to provide information about how Users found your publicly available work on BioEnergetics Inc., and what has referred them to it (e.g. which search engine). Ensure the security of your personal data
  We process your personal data in order to avoid its accidental or unlawful destruction, as well as its loss, alteration, or unauthorized disclosure. For example, we process the number of profile pages you and others view so as to detect and prevent data harvesting. Likewise, we truncate the last octet of your IP address to prevent you from being identified.
• We use your personal data to generate statistics which pertain to reading/search behavior and achievements. We also generate statistics for internal purposes in order to constantly improve the Service and its features. We also conduct research and development to maintain quality and improve our Service and the User experience. We might also share research results with scientific bodies for science studies and related topics. In none of these cases, we will share any personal data of Users.

Information we process when using technologies like cookies and pixels

We and service providers acting on our behalf store log files and use tracking technologies such as cookies, web beacons, tracking pixels, and local shared objects, also known as flash cookies, to collect information relating to you and your use of the Service.

• Basics
  "Cookies" are small files that enable us to store and collect specific information related to you and your use of the Service on your computer or other end devices. They help us to analyze the number of people who use the Service, usage frequency, User behavior and advertising effectiveness, to increase security and to tailor our Service and advertisements to your needs and preferences.
• This website uses so-called "session cookies" which after your session on the website session ends, will automatically be deleted. 
• This website also uses "persistent cookies" to record information about repeat Users of the Service. Persistent cookies are designed to help us continually improve the products and services we offer you and to ensure the quality of our services. "Persistent cookies" remain for a certain pre-defined period of time and are recognized by us when you return to the Service (or one of our partner sites).
• You can edit the settings of your browser to prevent cookies from being stored, to limit the storage of cookies to certain websites, or such that your browser informs you every time a cookie is sent. You can also delete cookies at any time. However, please note that if cookies are deactivated you will not be able to take advantage of some of BioEnergetics Inc. features. For specific help on how to delete Cookies with the help of your browser, please consult respective help sections, such as Google Chrome, Mozilla Firefox or Safari.
• Cookie table for BioEnergetics Inc.
  BioEnergetics Inc. use cookies for various purposes, but cookies primarily help us provide, protect and improve our products and services, tailor advertising and content, and better understand the use of our services. The following table will provide you with information on cookies that BioEnergetics Inc. is placing and using, their respective retention period and purpose.
  Name
  
  Party
  
  Purpose
  
  Lifetime
  
  

 Third-party services

• Google Services
  Google Analytics: We use Google Analytics to evaluate the usage behavior on our Service. Google Analytics is a web analysis service provided by Google Ireland Ltd, Gordon House, Barrow Street, Dublin 4, Ireland. For this web analysis service, Google uses cookies on our website to systematically evaluate the interactions of Users on our Service. The information generated by the cookie about the use of our Service by the user (e.g. truncated IP address, website currently visited, referrer, duration of stay, and frequency of the call of the website) is transferred to a Google server in Ireland. In addition, a transfer of the data to another Google server in the USA is possible. Google will use this information for the purpose of evaluating your use of the Service, compiling reports on website activity for us, and providing other services relating to website activity and Internet usage. The processed data can be used to create pseudonymous user profiles of Users. The data is deleted after 26 months. By activating IP anonymization on our website, your IP address is truncated before it is forwarded within the member states of the European Union or other states party to the Agreement on the European Economic Area. Only in exceptional cases will your full IP address be forwarded to a Google server in Ireland and possibly the USA and shortened there. Google will not combine your IP address collected via Google Analytics with other data that Google holds.
• Recipients and safeguards
• Recipients
  BioEnergetics Inc. does not sell any of your personal data.
  Some of your personal data is accessible to other Users of our platform who may, for example, belong to a group you joined like your profile. Your personal data may also be transferred to third parties as described in this Privacy Policy and where applicable to those third parties listed in our consent modal. These parties might be advertisers or companies that help us disseminate advertisements, measure the performance of our advertisements and/or analyze your use of the Service. These third parties will not receive data that directly personally identifies you. The data shared is limited to identifiers such as IP addresses and cookie IDs. Your name, email address, and other directly identifying data will only be shared with third parties if you explicitly allow us to share this data.
  We may also disclose personal data in response to legal process or when the law requires it (for example, in response to a court order) or, to the extent permitted by applicable law, to protect the rights, property, or safety of BioEnergetics Inc., the Service, Users of the Service (including you), and others.
  We may use third party service providers, in particular for technical and business services, tax advisors and legal counsel. These service providers receive personal data solely for the performance of their services for us on our behalf. They are contractually obliged not to use personal data for other purposes.

 

Closing your account and retention of personal data

For Members, we generally store their personal data as long as their account is active.

If you have created an account, you can close it yourself in your ‘Account Settings’. If you request that we close your account for you, we might ask for proof of identity before doing so.

We may also close inactive accounts or accounts that are used in violation of our Terms of Service or any applicable law.

Immediately after closing an account, it will not be accessible/visible anymore. Please note that closing an account is irreversible.

For Members, we will retain personal data from closed or inactive accounts to the extent and as long as it is necessary and relevant for our operations and/or to comply with law, prevent fraud, collect any fees owed, resolve disputes, troubleshoot problems, assist with any investigations, enforce our Terms of Service, and/or take other actions otherwise permitted by law.

In general, personal data from closed or inactive accounts will be deleted or anonymized from our system backups one year after the account is closed or deactivated.

We only keep personal data for the time strictly necessary in order to enable the use of our Service and/or to fulfill the purposes identified above, and/or to comply with any legal or regulatory obligations. In all other cases, we delete your personal data with the exception of such data that we are required to retain for the purpose of contractual or statutory (e.g., taxation or commercial law) retention periods. In particular, we keep payment and invoice related information or support inquiries to the extent required by trade and tax law for the statutory retention periods (ten, respectively six years).