ScholarReels The scholarly index for research videos. An initiative by SheQAI Research.

Privacy Policy

ScholarReels · a SheQAI Research initiative · Last updated 10 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 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, Microsoft, Apple, ORCID, or your institution's single sign-on, 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 or PhD researcher) — which is displayed with the published video;
  • for a community upload, the name, email, and affiliation of the PhD reviewer you name, and for a Video Abstract your co-authors' emails. We email those people one-time confirmation links, so only give us contacts who have agreed;
  • optionally, your ORCID or Google Scholar link.

Nothing is published automatically — a moderator 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; 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 is a permanent scholarly record: the video, its paper metadata, and the identities attached to it — the submitting author's name and affiliation and the reviewing researcher's name and affiliation — 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 SHA-256 hash of the IP — the raw address is never stored for these.
  • The only usage analytics we run is our own self-hosted, cookieless page-statistics tool on our own infrastructure — no Google Analytics, no third-party trackers.
  • There is no payment processing on ScholarReels — organization channels are arranged directly with the venue or institution.

Who your data reaches (service providers)

  • 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 fonts from Google's CDN, so Google receives your IP address when a page loads.
  • 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).

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]