Privacy notice

Who we are

The Okanagan Student Research Initiative (OSRI) is a student-run research publishing venue in the Okanagan Valley, British Columbia. For questions about anything on this page, write to osri.editors@gmail.com.

What we collect

We collect personal information in two places, both of which are forms you choose to fill in. We do not collect anything from people who simply read the site.

Manuscript submissions

Your name, email address, school, grade, co-author details, a link to your manuscript, and whatever you write in the ethics and AI disclosure sections. If a supervisor co-signs, their name and email.

Research question suggestions

Your name, email address, school, grade, the question, the source you identified, and whether you want to be credited by name if it is published.

What we do not collect

• No accounts, no passwords.
• No advertising or analytics trackers, and no cookies set by us.
• No information about you from any other source.
• We never ask for and do not want signed participant consent forms, raw research data, or anything identifying the people in your study. Keep those yourself.

Why we collect it

• To review and publish your work. We need to know who wrote it and how to reach you about it.
• To run ethics review. Your description of the study is how the Ethics Review Panel assigns a tier.
• To credit you. If your work or your suggested question is published, your name, school and grade appear on this site, where anyone can read them. That is the point of publishing, and it is the one thing on this page you should think hardest about before submitting.

We do not use your information for anything else. We do not sell it, and we do not send newsletters or unrelated messages.

Where it is stored and who it is seen by

Form submissions are received and stored by Netlify, the company that hosts this website. This means your submission is held on servers that may be outside Canada, and is subject to the laws of the country it is stored in.

Within OSRI, submissions are read by the editors, and — for studies involving people — by the Ethics Review Panel. Manuscripts sent out for peer review are sent without your name attached; reviewers do not know who you are.

What becomes public

If your work is accepted and you approve the final version, the following appears publicly on this site: your name, your school, your grade, the title, the abstract, and the manuscript itself.

Your email address is never published.

If you suggest a research question and tick the credit box, your name and school appear next to it. Leave the box unticked and the question is published with no name attached.

How long we keep it

• Declined or withdrawn submissions: deleted within twelve months of the decision.
• Published work: kept indefinitely. A published paper is a permanent record that others may cite, which is the point of publishing it.
• Question suggestions we do not use: deleted within twelve months.

Your rights

Under British Columbia's Personal Information Protection Act you may ask us what personal information we hold about you, ask us to correct it if it is wrong, and ask us to delete it. Write to osri.editors@gmail.com and we will respond within 30 days.

Withdrawing published work. You may ask for your published work to be withdrawn at any time. We remove the file and leave a short withdrawal notice in its place, so that links and citations to it do not silently break. If you also want your name removed from that notice, say so and we will do it.

If you are under 19, a parent or guardian may make any of these requests on your behalf.

Changes to this notice

If we change how we handle personal information, we will update this page and change the date at the top. Changes are not applied retroactively to work already published.