Privacy Policy
Last updated: 3 September 2026
This policy explains what personal data the International Research Journal of
Humanities and Interdisciplinary Studies (IRJHIS), ISSN 2582-8568, collects
through www.irjhis.com, why we collect it, how long we keep it, and
what rights you have. It is written to reflect the Digital Personal Data Protection
Act, 2023.
1. Who is responsible for your data
IRJHIS, published by Shreyas Publication, Chhatrapati Sambhajinagar (Aurangabad),
Maharashtra, India, is the Data Fiduciary for the personal data described here. Our
contact details are in section 12.
2. What we collect
When you register an account: your name, email address, mobile number
and postal address. Your email address is also your username. Your password is stored
only as a one-way cryptographic hash, so we cannot read it.
When you submit a paper: the title, abstract, subject category and
keywords; the name, designation and institutional affiliation of each author (up to
five); and a postal address, city, state, country and PIN code for correspondence.
Files you upload: the manuscript, an editable copy for reviewers, a
signed copyright form, and a document you provide as proof of identity or affiliation.
Revised versions are kept alongside the original.
When you pay: the transaction reference, payment reference, amount,
currency, date and outcome. Payment is processed by a third-party payment gateway
— we never receive or store your card number, UPI ID, net-banking
credentials, CVV or PIN.
Automatically, when you use the site: your IP address, the pages and
documents you request, and the date and time. We keep a record of sign-in attempts and
of access to submitted documents, so that we can detect and investigate misuse.
3. Identification documents, and Aadhaar
Where we ask for proof of identity, we are asking for institutional or
professional identification — a college or university identity card,
an employee identity card, or a letter of affiliation.
We do not ask for, and do not want, your Aadhaar
card or Aadhaar number. The same applies to a PAN card, passport, voter
identity card, driving licence or bank details. These are not required to publish
your work, and our submission forms tell you not to upload them.
We do not use any such document to authenticate your identity, we do not perform
any Aadhaar verification or authentication, and we do not record an Aadhaar number
as a data field anywhere in our systems.
If such a document is uploaded to us anyway, contrary to those instructions:
- we will delete it when we become aware of it, and we may do so without notice
and without opening it;
- we will not use it for any purpose; and
- we may ask you to supply acceptable identification instead.
You can ask us to delete such a document at any time by writing to
editor@irjhis.com with your name and the
title of your paper. We will act on that request without asking you for a reason,
and it will not affect the consideration or publication of your work.
We recognise that where such a document is in our possession we have duties under
the Digital Personal Data Protection Act, 2023 in respect of it, and we do not seek
to avoid them. The purpose of this section is to be clear that we neither request
nor require these documents, and to tell you how to have one removed.
4. Why we use your data, and on what basis
| Purpose |
Basis |
| Creating and running your author account |
Your consent, given at registration |
| Receiving, reviewing and deciding on your paper; corresponding with you about it |
Your consent, given at submission |
| Verifying that you are who you say you are, and your affiliation |
Your consent, given at submission |
| Publishing your paper, its author details and its metadata; sending them to
indexing services; assigning a DOI |
Your consent and the copyright form you sign; thereafter the legitimate purpose
of maintaining the scholarly record |
| Taking and reconciling publication charges; keeping accounting records |
Performance of our agreement with you; compliance with tax and accounting law |
| Keeping the site secure — recording sign-ins, document access and
administrative actions, and investigating misuse |
Our legal obligation to protect personal data, and the legitimate purpose of
preventing fraud and unauthorised access |
We do not use your data for automated decision-making or profiling, and we do not use
it to advertise to you.
5. Who we share it with
Peer reviewers. Review is double-blind. Reviewers receive the
manuscript and are not shown your identity; likewise you are not told theirs.
Our payment gateway, to take and confirm payment.
Indexing and abstracting services, which receive published
article metadata — title, abstract, keywords, author names and affiliations as
printed, and the DOI. They do not receive your contact details, your identification
document, or any unpublished manuscript.
Our hosting provider, which stores the site and its data on our behalf.
We do not sell your personal data, and we do not share it for anyone else's marketing.
We may disclose data where we are legally required to, or to protect our rights.
6. Cookies and third-party content
We set a session cookie so that the site can remember you are signed
in. It is required for the site to work and is discarded when you sign out or your
session expires. We also use a hidden token on our forms to protect against
cross-site request forgery.
Some of our public pages include Google AdSense advertising and a
visitor counter. These are provided by third parties which may set
their own cookies and may process your data outside India under their own privacy
terms. They are not present on the signed-in author, reviewer or administrator pages.
You can control advertising cookies through
Google's My Ad
Center and through your browser settings.
7. How long we keep it
| Data |
Retention |
| Published papers, author names as printed, and citation metadata |
Permanently — this is the scholarly record |
| Your account and contact details |
While your account is active, and until you ask us to close it |
| Identification documents |
Deleted once your identity and affiliation have been confirmed, and in any event
on request — see section 3 |
| Unpublished, rejected or withdrawn manuscripts |
Kept only as long as needed to deal with any query or appeal about the decision,
then deleted |
| Payment and accounting records |
As required by Indian tax and accounting law |
| Security and access logs |
180 days, as expected of us under the CERT-In directions, then deleted |
8. How we protect it
The site is served over HTTPS. Passwords are stored only as salted one-way hashes, never
in a readable form. Submitted documents are not available at a public
web address — they are released only through an authenticated handler that checks,
on every single request, whether the person asking is the author of that paper, the
reviewer assigned to it, or an administrator. Uploads are checked server-side against an
allow-list of file types and against the file's actual contents, and stored under names
that cannot be guessed. Access to documents and administrative actions are recorded in
an audit log that is not reachable over the web.
No system can be guaranteed secure. If a breach occurs that is likely to affect you, we
will inform you and the Data Protection Board as required by law.
9. Your rights
Under the Digital Personal Data Protection Act, 2023 you may:
- Ask what we hold about you, and a summary of how it is processed
and who it has been shared with.
- Have it corrected if it is wrong, incomplete or out of date. If a
correction affects a paper already published, we will consider it as a correction
notice under our Publication Ethics.
- Have it erased where it is no longer needed for the purpose it was
collected for. This includes your account, your contact details, any identification
document, and any unpublished manuscript.
- Nominate another person to exercise these rights on your behalf if
you die or become incapacitated.
- Complain to us, and then to the Data Protection Board of India.
- Withdraw your consent at any time. Withdrawing consent does not
undo processing already carried out lawfully, and if you withdraw it while your
paper is under consideration we may be unable to continue considering it.
One important limit on erasure. We cannot remove a paper that has
already been published, the author names printed on it, or its DOI and citation
details. A DOI is meant to resolve permanently, other researchers may already have
cited the work, and removing a byline would misstate the record rather than protect
anyone's privacy. Where a published paper genuinely must be withdrawn, that is done as
a retraction with a public notice under our
Publication Ethics. Everything else — your
account, your contact details, your identification document, your manuscript files
— can be erased on request. We will tell you clearly what we have removed and what
we have kept, and why.
We may also need to keep certain records for a limited period even after an erasure
request: payment records for tax purposes, and security log entries for the 180-day
period referred to in section 7. Those entries identify you only by an internal account
number.
To exercise any of these rights, write to
editor@irjhis.com. We may ask you to confirm your
identity first — otherwise someone else could ask us to delete your work. We aim
to respond within 30 days.
10. Co-authors
A paper is submitted by one author, who provides the names, designations and
affiliations of the co-authors. The submitting author confirms to us that every
co-author has agreed to this. If you are a co-author and want to know what we hold about
you, have it corrected, or object to it, please write to us at
editor@irjhis.com and we will deal with your
request directly.
11. Children
This site is intended for researchers and academics aged 18 or over. We do not knowingly
collect data about children. If you believe a child's data has been provided to us,
please tell us and we will delete it.
12. Contact and grievance redressal
For any question about this policy, or to exercise your rights, contact our grievance
officer:
The Editor-in-Chief, IRJHIS (Grievance Officer)
Department of Sociology, Milind College of Arts,
Nagsenvana, Chhatrapati Sambhajinagar (Aurangabad),
Maharashtra, India
Email: editor@irjhis.com
Telephone: +91 9422243905
If you are not satisfied with our response, you may complain to the
Data Protection Board of India.
13. Changes to this policy
We may update this policy. The date at the top shows when it last changed. Where a
change materially affects how we use your data, we will say so on this page.