Privacy Policy

“Machine Science” is an international scientific and technical journal published by Azerbaijan Technical University (AzTU), H. Javid ave 25, Baku AZ 1073, Azerbaijan. AzTU is the data controller for the personal data described in this policy. The editorial office can be reached at [email protected].

This policy covers the public journal site and the author and reviewer portal used to submit and review manuscripts.

Readers

You can read the entire journal without an account and without identifying yourself. When a page or a PDF is opened we record an anonymous usage event — the article concerned, the date, the approximate country, the referring page and the browser's user-agent string — so that we can report how often work published with us is read and downloaded. These counts are what appear as “views” and “downloads” on an article page.

IP addresses are used to derive the country and to stop a single visitor inflating a counter. They are not used to build a profile of you and are not linked to an account.

Correspondents

If you write to us through the contact form we receive your name, e-mail address and message. We use them to answer you and to keep a record of the correspondence.

Authors, reviewers and editors

Holding an account in the portal means we store the details you enter: name, academic title, degree, position, affiliation, country, city, postal code, telephone, e-mail, ORCID and any other identifiers you supply. We use them to run peer review, to correspond with you about a manuscript, to attribute published work, and to meet the metadata requirements of indexing services.

Manuscripts, supplementary files, cover letters, referee reports and editorial decisions are stored as part of the editorial record of the journal.

We process personal data because it is necessary to perform the service you have asked us for — publishing, reviewing or corresponding — and because AzTU has a legitimate interest in operating a scholarly journal, maintaining an accurate publication record and reporting readership. Where we ask for consent, you may withdraw it at any time.

Scholarly publishing is public by design. When an article is published, the author names, affiliations, countries, ORCID identifiers and the corresponding author's e-mail address are published with it and are distributed to indexing and abstracting services, to Crossref with the DOI, and to any harvester that collects our metadata.

Peer review is double-blind. Reviewer identities are not disclosed to authors, and reviewer reports are not published.

We share personal data only where it is necessary: with editors and peer reviewers handling a manuscript; with Crossref for DOI registration and with indexing services, as described above; and with the university's IT providers who host the site and send our e-mail on our behalf.

We do not sell, rent or trade personal data, and we do not run advertising networks on this site.

The public site sets no advertising or analytics cookies. It stores one preference in your browser's local storage — the light or dark theme you chose — which never leaves your device and can be cleared through your browser.

The portal stores the sign-in tokens that keep you logged in. Clearing your browser storage or signing out removes them.

The published record — articles, their metadata and the editorial history behind them — is kept permanently, because a journal of record must remain verifiable. Correspondence is kept as long as it is useful to the editorial office. Anonymous usage events are kept in aggregate. An account that is no longer used can be closed on request.

You may ask us for a copy of the personal data we hold about you, ask us to correct it, ask us to delete it, or object to how we use it. Write to [email protected] and we will respond within a reasonable period.

Where a request concerns data that forms part of the published scholarly record, we will explain what we can and cannot change, and offer a correction notice where that is the appropriate remedy.

Traffic to the journal and the portal is encrypted in transit. Passwords are stored only as salted hashes and are never readable by us. Access to manuscripts and reviewer reports is limited to the editors and reviewers assigned to them. Uploaded files are validated on the server and served so that they cannot execute.

No system is perfect. If you believe you have found a security problem affecting this site, please write to [email protected] and give us a reasonable opportunity to fix it before disclosing it publicly.

We may update this policy as the journal's practices change. Material changes will be announced on the site. Continuing to use the journal after a change means the revised policy applies.