GDPR Compliance

The General Data Protection Regulation (GDPR)

Regulation (EU) 2016/679 on the protection of natural persons with regard to the processing of personal data and on the free movement of such data. This text includes the corrigendum published in the OJEU of 23 May 2018.

The regulation is an essential step to strengthen individuals' fundamental rights in the digital age and facilitate business by clarifying rules for companies and public bodies in the digital single market. A single law will also do away with the current fragmentation in different national systems and unnecessary administrative burdens.

The GDPR therefore applies to the journal European Cooperation and we are committed to protecting the privacy of our customers.

The regulation entered into force on 24 May 2016 and applies since 25 May 2018. More information for companies and individuals.

Scholarly Publishing, Data Privacy, and the Public Interest

The realm of scholarly publishing raises a number of considerations for compliance with GDPR, particularly around the regulation’s core principle of the right to be forgotten. One function of scholarly publishing is to produce a historical record of the process involved in reviewing, editing, and publishing research and scholarship, with its own norms of confidentiality and privacy. As such, this form of publishing falls within what the GDPR recognizes as a need “to reconcile the right to the protection of personal data pursuant to this
Regulation with the right to freedom of expression and information, including processing for journalistic purposes and the purposes of academic, artistic or literary expression” (GDPR, Article 85). More specifically, the GDPR specifies that “the right of erasure” (Article 17) holds in situations in which “the personal data are no longer necessary in relation to the purposes for which they were collected or otherwise processed.” In scholarly publishing, data concerning the authors, editors, reviewers, and others involved in the editorial and publishing
process remains necessary for the purposes of the journal or press, and, as such, forms part of a record that the GDPR allows “for archiving purposes in the public interest, scientific or historical research purposes or statistical
purposes the preservation of which is in the public interest” (Recital 65). This does not apply to everyone registered with PKP software, as someone solely involved in the role of a “reader” would have reasonable grounds to expect a request to be forgotten to be honored by a journal or a press.

Personal data that is stored in the database of the journal European Cooperation

● Salutation
● First name
● Middle name
● Last name
● Suffix
● Username
● Gender
● Password (encrypted)
● Email address
● ORCiD ID
● Website
● Mailing Address
● Country
● Phone
● Fax
● Affiliation
● Biography
● Registration date
● Last login date
● Locales
● Reviewing interests
● Role registrations (author, reader, and/or reviewer)

This information is stored in the application database. Only the user password is encrypted.

This information is available to the user via their User Profile (and, with the exception of the username and dates, can be edited). System administrators, journal managers, and editors can also access and edit this data (except the username and dates) via the application back end. The data can be downloaded by journal managers in XML format.

This information is available to almost any submission participant, with some restrictions to preserve the blind peer review process. In short: contributing authors, editors and editorial assistants can all see this data; in most cases, only editorial staff can edit this data after submission.

Editors can download this data via author and submission reports. Most importantly: once a submission has been published, this data is made publicly available online in a variety of ways. It is available on the submission home page to readers, is available to indexing services in underlying metadata tags, is available via an OAI-PMH endpoint for harvesting, and may be made available in any number of ways via other system plugins.