Privacy Notice

Who we are

Fishboard is a Cameroonian company. This notice explains what personal data we collect across the platform — including Fishboard Research Repository, our open document repository — why we collect it, how long we keep it, and how you can exercise your rights over it.

What we collect and why

• Account details (name, email, role) — to operate your account, contract basis.
• Deposit and publication records — if you deposit a work with us, we record your agreement to the deposit terms (version, timestamp, and IP address at acceptance), on the basis of your consent.
• Readership events — when someone views or downloads a repository file, we record a salted, non-reversible hash of their session and their country, never a raw IP address. This is a legitimate interest: it's how we tell depositors their work is being read, and how we watch for unusual activity.
• Newsletter subscription (optional, separate consent) — if you subscribe, we use your email to send you updates. You can unsubscribe at any time, as easily as you subscribed.

The full technical register of every processing activity is maintained internally (our Data Processing Register) and available on request.

How long we keep it

• A published work stays published — we don't erase citation records. If it's ever taken down, the record remains as a placeholder (a "tombstone") rather than disappearing, so citations to it don't silently break.
• The IP address recorded when you accept a deposit agreement is kept for 24 months, then permanently removed — the rest of the record stays.
• Raw readership events are kept for 24 months, then summarised into monthly totals (with no session data) and the detailed rows are deleted.
• A deposit started but never finished is kept for 12 months, after which the personal details are removed and only anonymous statistics remain.

Where your data is hosted

Our infrastructure is hosted outside Cameroon, with providers whose own data-processing terms apply. We disclose this here rather than leaving it implicit — this is one of the areas we're finalising with legal counsel, and we'll update this notice once that review is complete.

Your rights

You can ask what data we hold about you, ask us to correct or delete it, object to how it's used, or withdraw a consent you gave us — at any time.

One important limit: if you've deposited a published work, we can delete your personal account data, but the published work itself is kept as a citation record (tombstoned, not erased) — see "How long we keep it" above.