Privacy at ESMP

Student Portal information

Portal accounts are linked to the participant's program record. The application stores the participant's name, encrypted email address, cohort, participation and portal status, and account timestamps such as invitation, activation, password-update, and last-login times.

Passwords are not stored in readable form. The application stores a salted password hash. Portal-session tokens, invitation tokens, and password-reset tokens are stored as one-way hashes, along with their expiry information where applicable.

The Portal stores private research-project titles. When a mentee chooses to save work in Data Extraction, Manuscript Formatter, or Journal Finder, the corresponding draft content is encrypted before storage. That content can include extraction variables and data dictionary entries, manuscript text and project details, journal search criteria, evidence returned for a search, and a saved journal shortlist.

Personal publication records can include bibliographic details such as title, authors, journal, DOI, links, abstract, keywords, and publication type and year. These records remain private to the account unless the mentee expressly requests a public listing.

Files and downloads

The current Portal does not provide server-side file-upload storage. A Word document selected for manuscript import is read in the browser; the original document is not uploaded to ESMP. Extracted text may become part of an encrypted manuscript draft if the mentee saves that project.

Data-extraction workbooks and formatted manuscript files are generated for download on the user's device. The downloaded XLSX or DOCX file is not uploaded or retained by the application merely because it was created.

Why we use this information

ESMP uses this information to manage participation, issue and verify certificates, provide account access, deliver learning resources, save a mentee's private project work, operate the research tools, and respond to correction, privacy, or support requests.

If a mentee elects to request a public publication listing, ESMP uses the request to review the record. The website displays a publication only after that request and approval; it is not made public merely because it exists in the mentee's Portal.

Service providers and external research services

The website and application run on Cloudflare Workers and use Cloudflare D1 for the application database. Cloudflare also processes routine request information needed to deliver, secure, and protect the service from abuse.

Portal invitation and password-reset messages are sent through Resend when email delivery is configured. Those messages include the recipient's email address and the information needed to send the message.

When a mentee uses DOI lookup, the DOI is sent to Crossref to retrieve bibliographic details. Journal Finder sends the selected research criteria to the research-metadata services it queries, including NCBI PubMed, Crossref, DOAJ, and OpenAlex. These services support the requested lookup; account passwords and private drafts are not sent as part of those requests.

Google Analytics is not enabled in the current application build.

Security measures

ESMP uses authenticated, account-specific access checks for Portal pages and project APIs. Session cookies are HTTP-only, use a same-site setting, and are marked Secure on HTTPS connections. Login, password-recovery, certificate-verification, and Journal Finder requests also have rate limits to help reduce abuse.

Participant emails are encrypted by the application for private administration, with a separate keyed one-way value used for exact email verification. Research-tool drafts are encrypted before being written to the database. Certificate IDs and Portal tokens are stored using one-way or encrypted representations appropriate to their function.

Retention and deletion

Certificate records are retained so issued certificates can be verified over time. They may be corrected, revoked, or removed where required by law or where a certificate is invalidated.

The current Portal does not apply a fixed automatic deletion period to account, publication, or saved project data. Those records remain in the application database until they are deleted through the application's administrative processes or the related participant record is removed. A mentee can delete a saved research project in the Portal; deleting it also removes its associated saved research-tool drafts.

Technical and security logs, along with contact messages, may be retained only as needed for service operation, security, abuse prevention, and responding to requests.