Privacy Policy — The Baobab Index

Who we are

The Baobab Index is an open archive of peer-reviewed abstracts on African food systems, hosted by the Centre for African Food Research and Innovation (CAFRI). For the purposes of the GDPR, CAFRI is the data controller responsible for your personal data. You can reach our data protection contact at the address in section 8.

Data we collect

Account data — your email address and, optionally, your name and ORCID identifier when you create an account.
Contributed content — abstracts, author lists, and metadata you submit to the index.
Usage data — saved searches and submission history linked to your account.
Technical data — strictly necessary cookies and standard server logs (IP address, browser type) used to keep the service secure and working.

We do not collect special-category data and do not use the service to build advertising profiles.

How we use it

To authenticate you and maintain your account and dashboard.
To publish and credit the abstracts you contribute.
To save and restore your searches across devices.
To keep the service secure, prevent abuse, and diagnose technical problems.

Legal basis

We process your data under the following GDPR legal bases:

Contract — to provide the account features you sign up for.
Legitimate interests — to secure the service and maintain a reliable scholarly archive.
Consent — where you voluntarily submit content for public publication.
Legal obligation — where we must retain records to comply with applicable law.

Sharing & processors

We never sell your personal data. Bibliographic metadata you submit is published openly under a CC-BY licence, which means author names and titles become publicly visible. We use a small number of trusted processors to host the database, authentication, and infrastructure on our behalf, each bound by data processing agreements. Where data is transferred outside the EEA, we rely on appropriate safeguards such as Standard Contractual Clauses.

Retention

We keep account data for as long as your account is active. If you delete your account, we remove your personal account data within 30 days, except where we are required to retain it by law. Published bibliographic metadata may be retained as part of the scholarly record even after account deletion.

Your rights

Under the GDPR you have the right to:

Access the personal data we hold about you.
Rectify inaccurate or incomplete data.
Erase your data ("right to be forgotten").
Restrict or object to certain processing.
Port your data to another service in a structured format.
Withdraw consent at any time, without affecting prior processing.
Lodge a complaint with your local data protection authority.

To exercise any of these rights, contact us using the details below. We respond within one month.

Submit a data rights request →

Contact

For any privacy question or to exercise your rights, email our data protection contact at privacy@cafri.org. See also our Cookie Policy.