Privacy Policy

2. Information we process

Depending on how you use the service, you may provide your name, email address, ORCID identifier and authentication information; professional and scientific profile, employment, education, location, salary and availability information; avatars and uploaded publication PDFs; publication associations; skill entries and research roles; colleague confirmation responses; recruiter-entered role descriptions; search queries, saved searches and shortlists; chats, other communications and support requests.

Benchpro obtains publicly available professional and scholarly information about scientists, including people who do not have a Benchpro account and co-authors of registered users, from sources such as OpenAlex, ORCID, publisher records and other scholarly metadata providers. We use this information to associate publications with authors, suggest skills and research sources, support colleague confirmation, and provide scientific profiles and talent discovery.

Public API and publisher records remain distinguishable from information supplied by registered users. Benchpro-generated classifications and profile suggestions are inferences; skill entries and research roles are recorded by users, and confirmation responses come from colleagues. Automated extraction, source existence and a contribution listed in a publication are not proof of participation or colleague confirmation.

If you do not have a Benchpro account but information about you appears in the service, you may contact us to request access, correction, objection, restriction or deletion, subject to applicable law.

3. Technical information

The service and its infrastructure may record IP addresses, timestamps, browser or user-agent information, request paths, diagnostic events, authentication and security events, and similar server logs needed to deliver and protect the service. Benchpro does not use device fingerprinting, cross-site behavioural tracking, or precise location tracking.

Sentry receives server-side error reports that may contain request and account context needed to diagnose a failure. The browser feedback interface has automatic browser integrations and client reports disabled. It sends feedback to Sentry only when you choose to submit the form; the submission can include the details you enter, technical context, and a screenshot if you choose to provide one.

4. Essential session cookie

The only cookie Benchpro currently uses is a strictly necessary first-party session cookie named _benchpro_key. It authenticates users, maintains secure sessions and protects requests against cross-site request forgery. It expires when the browser session ends. Benchpro does not currently use analytics, advertising or marketing cookies.

This cookie cannot be disabled through a consent preference because the authenticated service cannot operate securely without it. A theme choice may be stored locally in your browser; it is not used to follow you across websites.

When ORCID reauthorisation is needed, the browser’s session storage may hold a draft for about 10 minutes so work is not lost during the redirect. The draft can include research-source, skill, role, colleague and topic details, identifiers, URLs, dates and terms-acceptance state. Session storage is not a cookie and is confined to that browser tab.

5. Purposes and legal bases

• Contract and requested pre-contract steps: creating accounts and providing the profiles, skills, colleague confirmation, search, and discovery features requested by users.
• Legitimate interests: associating public scholarly records with authors; making scientific work and skills discoverable; securing, maintaining, and improving the service; preventing abuse; communicating with colleagues where appropriate; and keeping proportionate diagnostic records. We balance these interests against the source, sensitivity, public professional context, reasonable expectations, and rights of the people concerned.
• Consent: processing that is genuinely optional and based on a specific, informed, withdrawable choice, including any use clearly presented on that basis.
• Legal obligation: complying with valid legal, tax, security, and data-protection requirements.

Where we rely on legitimate interests for a non-user profile, you may object and ask us to assess your circumstances. Accepting the Terms does not create a legal basis where data-protection law requires another basis.

6. AI-assisted processing

Benchpro sends full uploaded publication PDFs to the OpenAI API for document and DOI checks and author extraction, and separately to the paid Google Gemini Developer API for publication and method extraction. Derived publication metadata, abstracts, affiliations, contributors, methods and extracted passages are stored in Benchpro; the source PDF is held temporarily as described below.

For other AI-assisted features, relevant publication sections or method excerpts and taxonomy candidates may be sent to Gemini for skill classification; recruiter-entered role descriptions and taxonomy candidates may be sent for role inference; and ambiguous ORCID author matching may send an ORCID identifier, names, affiliations, positions, locations and dates for identity adjudication. OpenAI is also used for taxonomy embeddings.

OpenAI states that API data is not used to train its models by default; abuse-monitoring logs may be retained for up to 30 days. Google states that prompts and responses submitted through the paid Gemini service are not used to improve its products, although limited abuse-monitoring retention applies. Provider handling may change, so the current provider terms and controls also apply.

AI-generated results may be incomplete or incorrect and do not by themselves establish participation or confirm a skill or research role. Users record skill entries and may request confirmation from colleagues, including co-authors where relevant. Benchpro does not rely solely on automated processing to make decisions that produce legal or similarly significant effects.

7. Public profiles and confirmation

A public profile may show a scientist’s name, ORCID identifier, avatar, professional and scholarly information, research sources, skill entries and research roles, confirmation status, and confirming colleague information. Profiles and scholarly records may also concern people who have not registered. Public pages and discovery results can be copied or indexed by others.

Benchpro does not currently provide a general public-profile visibility switch. You can request correction, restriction, objection, or removal by contacting us. Confirmation records the applicable workflow and human response; it is not independent certification of proficiency or a guarantee. Profile confirmation labels and talent-discovery status use different criteria.

Benchpro is not a recruitment agency, employer, university, research institution, professional regulator or credentialing body. Users and organisations must conduct independent interviews, reference checks, credential checks, regulatory checks and other appropriate due diligence before making employment, funding, admission, clinical, safety-critical or other high-impact decisions.

8. Service providers and data sources

Benchpro uses the following services where relevant to a feature:

• Fly.io: application hosting on Machines and managed PostgreSQL in iad (Ashburn, Virginia, United States).
• Tigris: globally placed object storage for user-uploaded avatars and publication PDFs held temporarily for parsing.
• Postmark: transactional and service email delivery. Depending on the message, Postmark receives the recipient’s name and email address, action links, skill or confirmation-request context and message content; Benchpro stores the resulting provider delivery identifier. A submitted or queued request does not itself establish email delivery.
• Sentry: server error monitoring and user-initiated browser feedback.
• OpenAI and Google Gemini: the limited AI-assisted processing described above.
• ORCID: account authentication and synchronisation of authorised ORCID records.
• LinkedIn: user-initiated OAuth connection and publishing. Benchpro exchanges the authorisation code, stores the returned OIDC subject and token expiry, and stores the access token in encrypted form. It sends commentary and the user’s public Benchpro profile URL to LinkedIn only when the user chooses to publish.
• OpenAlex and other scholarly sources: publication, authorship, and professional metadata. Other sources used for a requested record may include PubMed/NCBI, protocols.io, publisher records, and public research-funding databases.
• Google Places and public web assets: location lookup where requested and delivery of fonts or interface assets; those providers receive ordinary network request information.

We may also disclose information to professional advisers, courts, regulators, or authorities when reasonably necessary to establish or defend legal claims or comply with law. Benchpro does not sell personal data.

9. International transfers

Benchpro is operated from Portugal, while the application and managed database run in the United States. Tigris uses global/default bucket placement, and other providers may process data in the United States or other countries described in their current service terms.

Benchpro protects personal-data transfers outside the European Economic Area under the applicable mechanisms required by the GDPR. The provider-specific safeguard has not yet been verified for every transfer, so we do not name an unverified mechanism here. You may contact us to request current details for a particular provider or transfer. We do not promise that all provider data remains in one region.

10. Retention and deletion

Account and profile data is generally kept while an account is active and then deleted or anonymised according to the account-deletion workflow, except where information is retained for legal, security, dispute, or independent lawful purposes. User-independent scholarly works and derived metadata may remain, and anonymised colleague responses and sanitised confirmation events may be retained to preserve the integrity of the scientific record and service workflow.

• Publication PDF objects are removed after terminal processing states and otherwise within approximately 24 hours.
• Completed or discarded background-job records are normally pruned after seven days.
• Server-side login-session records may remain valid for up to 60 days, although the current ORCID browser session cookie expires with the browser session.
• Fly.io managed-database recovery currently provides an approximately ten-day rolling point-in-time recovery window with hourly restore points.
• OpenAI abuse-monitoring logs may be retained for up to 30 days; limited Gemini abuse-monitoring retention also applies.
• Operational logs, Sentry records, and email-delivery records are retained under the current service settings and only for as long as needed for their operational, security, support, or legal purpose; no shorter fixed period is promised here.

After account deletion, Benchpro queues deletion of your managed avatar from Tigris and retries temporary storage failures. External profile photos hosted by other providers are not stored or deleted by Benchpro. Provider systems, backups, and records held for legal or security reasons may not be deleted immediately.

11. Security

Benchpro uses proportionate technical and organisational safeguards, including access controls, encrypted transport, signed session cookies, encrypted storage for OAuth tokens, environment-separated secrets, and monitoring. No internet service or storage system can guarantee absolute security.

12. Individual rights

Subject to applicable law, you may request access, rectification, erasure, restriction, portability, or information about your personal data; object to processing based on legitimate interests; and withdraw consent where processing relies on consent. Withdrawal does not affect earlier lawful processing. These rights also apply to non-users represented through scholarly metadata.

Send a request to miguel@benchpro.ai. We may need to verify your identity and relationship to the record. You also have the right to complain to Portugal’s Comissão Nacional de Proteção de Dados (CNPD) through www.cnpd.pt or to another competent supervisory authority.

13. Minors

Accounts are for people who are at least 18 years old or have reached the age of majority in their jurisdiction, whichever is higher. If we learn that a minor created an account or that we processed a minor’s data inappropriately, we will investigate and restrict or delete it as required by law. Public scholarly records can concern younger researchers; they and their representatives may exercise the rights described above.

14. Changes and contact

We may update this policy when the service, providers, or law changes. We will update the date above and, where practical, give registered users reasonable notice of a material change by email or within the service.

Questions and requests may be sent to miguel@benchpro.ai or by post using the address in the Legal Notice.