Privacy Policy

Last updated: September 2026

The short version: your manuscript belongs to you. We never sell it, publish it, claim it as our own, or share it outside the reviewers and staff directly involved in reviewing it. We use it for exactly one purpose — to deliver the review service you paid for — and for nothing else.

1. Who We Are

AP-Review ("we", "us", "our", "the Platform") provides professional academic manuscript review services, including double-blind peer review, plagiarism screening, AI-content detection, and citation verification, to scholars, researchers, journal editors, and institutions.

2. Ownership of Your Work

You retain full and exclusive copyright and intellectual property ownership of every manuscript, abstract, dataset, or supporting document you submit. Submitting a manuscript to AP-Review does not transfer, license, or assign any ownership right to us. We do not publish your work, list it publicly, reproduce it beyond what is strictly necessary to perform the review, or use it to train any model, product, or service. Our role is limited to facilitating an independent review at your request — nothing more.

3. What We Collect

We collect the minimum information needed to operate the Platform:

Account information: name, email address, phone number, institution, and country you provide at registration.
Manuscript data: the manuscript file itself, title, abstract, keywords, research area, and any revision history you submit.
Payment information: we never see or store your card number, bank PIN, or full account credentials. Payments are processed directly by our licensed payment partners (Paystack, Flutterwave) or, for bank transfers, verified against your bank's own transaction records. We retain only the transaction reference, amount, currency, and status needed for your invoice and our accounting records.
Usage information: login timestamps, IP address, and basic device/browser information, kept for security and fraud-prevention purposes.

4. How Your Manuscript Is Handled

Your manuscript file is stored outside our public web directory, is never directly browsable or linkable, and can only be retrieved through an authenticated request from your own account or an authorized staff/reviewer account tied to that specific submission.
For double-blind review, reviewers are not shown your name, institution, or any other identifying information, and you are not shown theirs.
Reviewers and staff who access your manuscript are bound by confidentiality obligations as a condition of working with the Platform. They may not copy, redistribute, publish, cite, or otherwise use your unpublished work outside the scope of the review they were assigned.
We do not share your manuscript with any third party for any purpose other than delivering the specific review services you selected (for example, submitting text to a plagiarism-detection or AI-detection engine strictly to generate your report).

5. Third-Party Services We Use

To operate the Platform, certain limited data passes through the following categories of trusted third-party providers, each bound by their own security and confidentiality obligations:

Payment processors (Paystack, Flutterwave) — to process your payment; they receive only what is needed to complete the transaction.
Plagiarism and AI-detection engines — to generate the specific reports you requested for your manuscript.
Email delivery — to send you account, submission, and payment notifications.
reCAPTCHA (Google) — to protect our registration and login forms from automated abuse.

We do not sell, rent, or trade your personal information or your manuscript content to advertisers, data brokers, or any other third party.

6. Data Retention

We retain your account information and submission records for as long as your account is active and for a reasonable period afterward to meet our legal, tax, and accounting obligations. You may request deletion of your account and associated personal data at any time (see Section 8), subject to records we are legally required to keep (for example, financial transaction records).

7. Security

We apply industry-standard safeguards including encrypted connections (HTTPS), hashed passwords, role-based access control, CSRF protection, file-type validation on uploads, and audit logging of administrative actions. No system is ever 100% immune to risk, but we treat the confidentiality of your work as a core obligation, not an afterthought.

8. Your Rights

Consistent with the Nigeria Data Protection Act and generally accepted data protection principles, you have the right to:

Access the personal data we hold about you;
Request correction of inaccurate information;
Request deletion of your account and personal data, subject to legal retention requirements;
Withdraw consent for optional communications at any time;
Lodge a complaint with us directly, or with the applicable data protection authority.

To exercise any of these rights, contact us using the details in Section 11 or open a support ticket from your dashboard.

9. Cookies

We use strictly necessary session cookies to keep you logged in securely, and a single local preference cookie for dark/light display mode. We do not use third-party advertising or tracking cookies.

10. Changes to This Policy

We may update this policy from time to time to reflect changes in our practices or for legal reasons. We will update the "Last updated" date above when we do. Continued use of the Platform after changes take effect constitutes acceptance of the revised policy.

11. Contact Us

If you have any questions, concerns, or requests regarding this Privacy Policy or how your data or manuscript is handled, please reach out via WhatsApp at +234 807 956 4764, or open a support ticket from your account dashboard.