ScholarReels The scholarly index and repository for research videos.

Privacy Policy

ScholarReels · a SheQAI Research initiative · Last updated 14 July 2026

ScholarReels is a public index of research videos. Browsing it requires no account and collects nothing beyond the technical minimum described below. This policy describes exactly what we collect when you sign in, subscribe, or submit a video, and what becomes public. We run no third-party advertising and no cross-site tracking, and we never sell your data. The posting and moderation rules are in the Service Agreement; the TeX2Vid rendering tool has its own privacy policy.

Your account and public profile

  • One SheQAI account works across our services: your email address and, if you set a password, a salted hash of it (never the password itself). If you sign in with Google or Microsoft, we store only your account identifier there and the name/email the provider shares. If you sign in with Google, we use only your name, email address, and Google account ID to operate your account, adhering to the Google API Services User Data Policy, including its Limited Use requirements.
  • Profile details you choose to add — author name, bio, ORCID, Google Scholar link, webpage, social links — are shown publicly on your author page when set. You can edit or clear them on your account page at any time.
  • Your subscriptions (authors, subjects, venues, institutions you follow) are stored to build your Following feed; they are not displayed to others.

Submitting a video

Submission requires an institutional email — your account email, or a university / institute address you add on your account page and verify by a one-time emailed link. We store what you provide:

  • the video file and its paper details (title, authors, arXiv ID/DOI, subject, keywords, publication status, venue);
  • your attestation — your name, affiliation, and role (author / co-author, or a qualified researcher sharing open-licensed work) — which is displayed with the published video;
  • if your TeX2Vid render's grounding review is flagged and you submit it anyway, the fact that you acknowledged the flagged items, and when. It is shown to the moderators reviewing your submission; it is not published on the video's page;
  • the name, email, and affiliation of any reviewer you name. We email a reviewer a one-time confirmation link, so only name someone who has agreed;
  • for a Video Abstract, your co-authors' names and emails. We email each of them to let them know that a video of the paper carries their name, with the paper details and a private link to watch it. They are not asked to approve anything — if one objects, they contact us. If you are the sole author, you declare that instead and we ask for no addresses. A co-author's link is private to them and stops working after 14 days;
  • if you say the paper is accepted, its decision letter — the acceptance email or letter from the conference or journal (PDF, or a photo/screenshot). It is private to our moderators: it is never published, never shown on the video's page, and no other user can read it. We keep it as the evidence the video's Accepted claim rests on, for as long as that video is published; it is deleted with the submission if the submission is rejected, expires, or is never confirmed. If you say the paper is published, we ask for the venue's DOI instead — which is public, because it is the paper's citation;
  • optionally, your ORCID or Google Scholar link.

Nothing is published automatically — the ScholarReels team reviews every video. An upload that is never email-confirmed is deleted after about a week; a rejected video file is deleted.

What becomes public

  • An approved video, its paper metadata, and the names shown on it (attester, reviewer, endorsers) are public until you make the video private or it is removed.
  • The attestation identities on a published video — the submitting author's and the reviewing researcher's names and affiliations — are kept as a permanent record corresponding to that video, and remain public even if the submitter's account is later deleted. Account deletion removes your profile and private data, not the attestation on a published video.
  • Likes, endorsements, and published comments are likewise public records: they remain after account deletion (an endorsement or comment keeps showing the name it was posted under; likes stay in the count).
  • Endorsing a video displays your name (and requires an institutional email); likes are shown only as a count (never who liked); comments appear with your name after moderation; views and shares are counted anonymously — no IP address is stored for them.
  • Public videos can be embedded on other websites; a visitor playing an embedded video loads it from us like any page visit.
Video Abstracts and DOIs — permanence. A Video Abstract published with a DOI becomes a permanent scholarly record: the video, its paper metadata, and the identities attached to it — the submitting author's name and affiliation, and the name and affiliation of the reviewing researcher where one is named — are kept as a permanent record and displayed publicly on the published video. The DOI deposit (with Zenodo, the open-access repository) cannot be withdrawn, and a DOI'd video cannot be made private. Only submit, attest, or review a Video Abstract if you accept this permanence.

Technical data, cookies, and analytics

  • We set one signed session cookie to keep you signed in (view counting is de-duplicated inside it). No advertising or third-party analytics cookies. (Our pages carry a Google AdSense site-verification tag only; we serve no ads today, and this policy will be updated first if that ever changes.)
  • Email throttles (confirmation-link resends, the contact form) use a one-way hash of the IP — the raw address is never stored for these.
  • We run no Google Analytics and no advertising or behavioural tracker, and build no profile of you. Our own page-statistics tool, when we use it, is self-hosted, cookieless on our own infrastructure.
  • The content-delivery network that serves our pages also provides a built-in, privacy-first, cookieless web-analytics feature we use to measure aggregate traffic. It sets no cookies, does not fingerprint you, does not follow you across other sites, and does not store or log your IP address for these statistics — we use it to understand how the site is used, not to collect personal data about you.
  • There is no payment processing on ScholarReels — organization channels are arranged directly with the venue or institution.

Service providers who help us run the index

  • Cloud service providers — the servers the index runs on, and the network security / content-delivery provider that routes every request.
  • Your sign-in provider — only if you choose to sign in with one.
  • Our email delivery provider — for the confirmation and moderation emails above.
  • Google Fonts — our pages load a webfont hosted by Google. As with any file your browser loads from another server, Google's font servers see your IP address only to deliver the font; no other information about you is sent, and it is not used to track you.
  • arXiv and public citation databases — we look up a paper's public metadata and citation count by its arXiv ID or DOI; no personal data is sent.
  • Zenodo — only when a DOI is minted for an author-attested Video Abstract (a permanent public deposit of the video and its paper metadata, under CC BY 4.0).

If you write to us through the contact form, your message and the contact details you include are emailed to us. We do not share your data with anyone else, and we never sell it.

Your choices and rights

You can edit your video's details, make it private (unless it carries a DOI), and edit or clear your public profile at any time. You can delete your SheQAI account yourself from your account page — this removes your profile, subscriptions, follows, and unpublished submissions. The public records stay: your published videos with their attestation record (the permanent record above), and your likes, endorsements, and published comments. If you want a non-DOI video unlisted, make it private before deleting your account. To request a copy of the data we hold about you, email us.

Changes to this policy

If we change what we collect or who processes it, we update this page and its date first.

Contact

SheQAI Research, Edmonton, Alberta, Canada · [email protected]