Privacy and Cookies information

Please refer to Rothamsted Privacy and Cookies page where you will find the Rothamsted Complete Policy in compliance with the General Data Protection Regulations (commonly known as the GDPR). This specific Policy applies to all personal data collected through the e-RA websites and applications. The main hub is at https://www.era.rothamsted.ac.uk

PRIVACY NOTICES

e-RA collects specific, relevant, and minimal personal information to provide you with the services you requested, manage our communication with you, and report our work to our funding agencies.

When we receive, hold or use your personal information, we will provide you with a Privacy Notice (PN) which sets out in detail what information we hold about you, how your personal information may be used, how long for, and the reasons for these uses, together with details of your rights.

We will provide this PN at the time we collect the personal information from you directly or when we first contact you, first pass the data to someone else or within a month, whichever is the earlier.

We will do that at least once, generally at the start of our relationship with you.

If the applicable PN is updated substantially, we will provide you with details of the updated version. You are encouraged to check regularly for updates.

HOW DO WE USE YOUR PERSONAL INFORMATION?

e-RA collects information to understand how the data is used, to manage your requests and for justification of our continued funding.

When requesting access to e-RAdata

The information collected via the request form is summarized at submission and in the confirmation email.

The information collected via the request form is used to:

• Assist you specifically - answering your question to the professional level you expect.
• Set up username and password when appropriate.
• Ensure proper usage and citation of the material.

When a dataset is downloaded

There is a short form that collects personal information from you - name, country, institute, and reason to download is requested. These is not compulsory, and the download will still happen if you do not provide information. These are recorded in our database and really help our understanding of how our data is used, so we appreciate your help in that matter.

The IP address from which the data was downloaded is also recorded. This can be considered personal data in some cases but not in some others.

WHO DO WE SHARE YOUR PERSONAL INFORMATION WITH?

Generally, we share information with a relevant party to provide services to you or to comply with agreements that we have entered with you to the extent that this is strictly necessary, and we will put in place arrangements to protect your personal information. We do not disclose your personal information unless we are required to do so by law.

If we need to transfer personal information about you outside the European Economic Area (EEA), we will let you know and ensure that all reasonable security measures are taken.

We do not sell, trade, or rent your personal information to others.

HOW LONG DO WE HOLD ON TO YOUR PERSONAL INFORMATION?

We will only hold your information for as long as is necessary. For the kind of work that we do, this can be up to 10 years.

WHAT ARE YOUR RIGHTS?

To exercise any of your rights, or if you have any questions relating to your rights, or to complain, please contact us first at era@rothamsted.ac.uk.

LINKING WITH THIRD PARTY SITES

Our site may contain links to other websites, regional bodies, or funders. If you follow a link to any of these websites, we do not accept any responsibility or liability for these sites privacy policies, and you should check these before you submit any personal information to these websites.

In addition, if you landed to our site through a link from a third-party site, we cannot be responsible for the privacy policies and practices of the owners or operators of that third-party site and recommend that you check the policy of that third party site and contact its owner or operator if you have any concerns or questions.

SECURITY

We take information and system security very seriously. We employ a variety of measures to keep your personal information safe and to prevent unauthorised access to, or use, or disclosure of it. Unfortunately, no information transmission over the internet, nor any storage of information is 100% secure.

COOKIES

We use cookies on our site to a minimum. Reading cookies does not give us access to other information on your computer's hard-drive and our site will not read cookies created by other websites that you have visited.

In general, these pieces of information are used to improve services for you, for example, by:

• enabling a service to recognise your device so you don't have to give the same information several times during one task.
• recognising that you may already have given a username and password, so you don't need to do it for every web page requested,
• analysing anonymised data to help us understand how people interact with our services.

For more information on deleting and controlling cookies visit aboutcookies.org.uk

FIRST-PARTY COOKIES - SESSION COOKIES

We use a session cookie which is used to identify users on the website. This is anonymous and only kept for one day. The session cookie for dataset download lasts 7 days. These cannot be used by third party, and are there solely to make your experience with the Site more comfortable.

THIRD-PARTY COOKIES

Cookies for advertising:

We do not use advertisement services or other third parties on the e-RA Site.

Cookies for improving service:

We use Google analytics to understand how visitors engage with our sites or apps. Google Analytics uses cookies to collect our sites' statistics. If you do not want Google Analytics to be used in your browser, you can install the Google Analytics Opt-out browser Add-on, provided by Google.

LOG FILES

In common with most websites, our Site logs various information about visitors, including internet protocol (IP) addresses, browser type, internet service provider (ISP) information, referring / exit pages, and date / time stamp.

We may use this information to analyse trends, administer the site, track your movement around the site and gather broad demographic information.

CHANGES TO THIS POLICY

Any changes we may make to this Policy in the future will be posted on our Site and, where appropriate, notified to you by e-mail. When we change this Policy in a material way, we will update the version date at the bottom of this page. Please check back frequently to see any updates or changes to this Policy and should you object to any alteration, please contact us as set out in the "Contact" section below.

CONTACT US

In the event of any query or complaint in connection with the information we hold about you:

Whilst this privacy policy sets out a general summary of your legal rights in respect of personal information, this is a very complex area of law. More information about your legal rights can be found on the Information Commissioner’s website at https://ico.org.uk/for-the-public/ .

Version Date: 20 March 2023