Privacy Policy

Bentham Open is committed to respecting your privacy. In this privacy notice, we describe how we collect and use your personal information, and the rights you have in relation to such information. We are the data controller of the personal data you provide to us for processing in accordance with this privacy notice.

1. Collection of Personal Information

We may collect personal information from you through your use of the website openenvironmentalresearchjournal.com (and affiliated websites operated by us; collectively, the ‘websites’), when you request information from us, when you engage us for publishing services, when you participate in any of our conferences, or as a result of your relationship with any of our editors, authors or institutional clients.

We may request, and collect from you, personally identifiable information and other information. Depending on the information or services you request, you may be asked to provide your name, email address, Bentham Account login credentials such as usernames and passwords and other information, such as the institution/s with which you are associated, your academic qualifications and professional qualifications or information such as field of study, current position, practice and interests, payment information such as credit card or debit card number.

By providing us with any personal information, you are consenting to the use of your personal information as contemplated in this privacy notice. If you do not want us to use your personal information for any of these purposes, please either do not provide us with your personal information or specify what you don’t want it to be used for.

In addition to the information you knowingly provide to us, we collect, via the websites, the domain names and IP addresses of visitors, along with usage statistics relating to the websites. (We do not collect personally identifiable information about your online activities over time or across third party websites or online services.)

We may also collect personal data about you automatically using Server Side Variable and Google Analytics including:

  • computer, device and connection information, such as IP address, browser type and version, operating system, mobile platform, unique device identifier and other technical identifiers;
  • usage data, such as click stream data, including date and time stamp and referring and exit pages, search terms you used, and pages you visited or searched for on the service; and
  • for location-aware services, the physical location of your device.

2. Purposes

We will only use your personal information for our legitimate business purposes, including:

  • to process and respond to inquiries, and provide our services;
  • to manage our relationship with editors, authors, institutional clients, service providers, and other business contacts;
  • to market our services;
  • subscription management;
  • to compile anonymous statistics, such as usage statistics for our websites and statistics on the effectiveness of invitations and other emails; and
  • where otherwise required by law.

If we re-organize our business, we may need to transfer your personal information to other Bentham group entities or third parties.

3. Client Relationship Management

We operate a Client Relationship Management email mailing list program, which we use to inform clients and other contacts about our services, including our publications and events. Such marketing messages may contain tracking technologies in order to track subscriber activity relating to engagement, demographics and other data, and to build subscriber profiles.

If you would like to cease receiving marketing materials from us at any time, please let our CRM team know directly at privacy@benthamopen.net. You can change your preferences for receiving our marketing emails and legal updates from us at any time, and you can unsubscribe by following the instructions specified in our marketing emails or via the websites, or by emailing us at privacy@benthamopen.net.

4. Sharing your Information

It may sometimes be necessary for us to share your personal information with other entities within the Bentham Group, as well as with editors, institutions, publishers, event organizers, agents, representatives, partners, societies, credit card processors, customer support, mailing houses, shipping agents and IT service providers and consultants around the world who provide services to us or on our behalf.

If you use the Bentham Subscription Service, your personal information and certain usage data gathered through the Subscription Service, such as the number of items you downloaded, any fee-based items you accessed, may be shared with your institution for the purposes of usage analysis and subscription management.

We have procedures in place to ensure the protection of personal information. These procedures include putting steps in place to ensure that recipients keep their personal information confidential and secure and only use it for the purposes that we have specified and communicated to you. In relation to any other third parties, we will only disclose your information where you have given your consent or where we are required to do so by law, or where it is necessary for the purpose of, or in connection with legal proceedings or in order to exercise or defend legal rights.

We may disclose your personal information to a recipient (i) for the purposes of outsourcing one or more of the purposes-related functions described above; (ii) to confirm or update information provided by you; (iii) to inform you of events, information about our services, and other important information, or (iv) for other purposes disclosed at or before the time the information is collected. If you tell us you wish to attend an event, your name and organization may appear on a list which we provide to other delegates at the event.

5. Cross-Border Transfer of Your Information

Your personal information may be transferred to and stored in servers and facilities located in your region or another country. Some of these countries do not provide the same level of data protection as the country in which you reside and are not recognized by the European Commission as providing an adequate level of protection.

We take steps to ensure that the personal information continues to be protected wherever it is located. When we transfer your information to other countries, we will use, share and safeguard that information as described in this privacy notice. We only transfer personal information to these countries, when it is necessary for the services we provide you, or subject to appropriate safeguards that assure the protection of your personal information, such as European Commission approved standard contractual clauses.

6. Your Rights

Under certain circumstances, you have the following rights:

  • Access and Accuracy: the right to ask us to provide you, or a third party, with copies of the personal information we hold about you at any time and to be informed of the contents and origin, verify its accuracy, or else request that such information be supplemented, updated or rectified in accordance with the applicable law;
  • Erasure or Blocking: the right to request erasure, anonymization or blocking of your personal information that is processed in breach of the law;
  • Objecting: the right to object on legitimate grounds to the processing of your personal information. In certain circumstances, we may not be able to stop using your personal information; if that is the case, we’ll let you know why;
  • Porting: the right to request that some of your personal information be provided to you or another data controller in a commonly used, machine-readable format.
  • Withdraw consent: when personal information is processed on the basis of consent, an individual may withdraw such consent at any time. In case you no longer want to receive any marketing material from us, please use the unsubscribe option (which is in all of our marketing emails to you), or contact us on the details set out below.

If you would like to exercise any of the above rights, please contact us at privacy@benthamopen.net, our dedicated email address, with queries regarding the processing of your personal data.

7. Confidentiality

The information you provide may be confidential, and we will maintain such confidentiality and protect your information in accordance with this privacy notice and applicable law. We do not sell, rent, distribute, or otherwise make, personal information commercially available to any third party. We may share information with our service providers for the purposes set out in this privacy notice.

8. Information Security

We have implemented reasonable administrative, technical and physical measures to protect your personal information against loss, misuse and alteration.

9. Cookies

We use ‘cookies’ to improve this website. Cookies are small files that are sent to a computer's hard drive by a web server. Cookies enable websites to remember who you are. Information from cookies may include information relating to your use of our websites, information about your computer (such as IP address and browser type), and demographic data. The list below sets out the types of cookies we use, and the purposes for which we use them. Most internet browsers have a mechanism notifying you when you receive a new cookie and how to reject new cookies or disable cookies altogether.

We are using Google Analytics and Zopim Chat Service. They store cookies on client computers.

 Cookie Name  Purpose
PHPSESSID  Maintain unique session id of each client.
__zlcmid  We are using third party Zopim chat service to provide support online. They are using this cookie.
_ga  Used to distinguish users. https://developers.google.com/tag-platform/gtagjs.
_gat  Used to throttle request rate. If Google Analytics is deployed via Google Tag Manager, this cookie will be named _dc_gtm_<property-id>. https://developers.google.com/tag-platform/gtagjs.
_gid  Used to distinguish users. https://developers.google.com/tag-platform/gtagjs.
has_js  The has_js cookie records whether your browser has JavaScript enabled.

10. Changes to this Notice

We may change this privacy notice from time to time, and your continued use of this website indicates your consent to the changes to the privacy notice. We will re-date the notice to show when there were any material changes.

11. Contact Information

If you have any questions about this privacy notice or our processing of your personal data, please get in touch with us at privacy@benthamopen.net. Our full corporate name and details are as follows: BENTHAM SCIENCE PUBLISHERS LTD, Executive Suite Y-2, PO Box 7917, Saif Zone, Sharjah, United Arab Emirates.