Privacy Policy

LitMark ("we", "us") provides an academic research tool at litmark.org. This policy explains what information we collect, why, and what we do with it.

What we collect

• Email address — used to log you in and to identify your subscription with our payment processor, Stripe.
• Search questions, essay text, and any other text you submit (including asking LitMark to summarise a saved source, or asking Vera a question) — sent to our AI provider, Anthropic, and to academic search services (OpenAlex, Semantic Scholar, Europe PMC, CORE) in order to return results to you. When you check an essay's citations, only the titles, authors, years and DOIs of the sources it cites (not the essay itself) go to those services, and to Crossref and the DOI registry (doi.org), to confirm the sources exist. We do not store this content in a database ourselves.
• Payment information — handled entirely by Stripe. We never see or store your card details.
• Standard server logs — like almost every website, our hosting provider (Render) and our frontend host (Netlify) automatically log basic technical information (IP address, browser type, timestamps) for security and reliability purposes.
• Local browser storage — we store a login session token, your search history, and any papers you've saved to "My folders" (titles, authors, and similar details) directly in your browser, not on our servers, so this stays with you between visits. If you ask Vera a question about your own folders, the relevant folder details (titles, authors, years and a short excerpt of each abstract — not your whole saved list unless it's relevant) are sent to our server and to Anthropic for that one question only, processed in memory, and not stored afterwards.
• Sign-up confirmations — when you subscribe, we record against your subscription in Stripe that you confirmed you are 18 or over and that you agreed to our Terms and to automatic renewal, along with the time and the version of the Terms.
• Abuse-protection records — to stop a single subscription being shared, our server keeps a short-lived count of requests and active sign-ins for each account (your email address and timestamps). Separately, to stop automated abuse of the public "Ask Vera" widget on our homepage, we keep a short-lived count of requests by IP address, with no account or email address involved. Both are held in memory only, not written to a database, and are cleared whenever the server restarts. If an account exceeds a limit, its email address may appear in our server logs.
• Your essay (Check my citations) — the text you paste or upload is held in memory only while the check runs. It is not saved to a database, your account or your search history, and it is not written to our server logs. Our logs can briefly record the titles and authors of the sources the check looks up.
• Your essay and marking criteria (Hit the Mark) — the essay and marking criteria or rubric you paste or upload are held in memory only while the check runs, and sent to Anthropic to assess the essay against each criterion. Neither is saved to a database, your account or your search history, and neither — including Anthropic's response — is written to our server logs, since it could otherwise capture wording from your essay or criteria. Where a criterion needs more supporting evidence, LitMark runs a literature search for that specific gap using a short topic phrase, not your essay or criteria text.

Who we share it with

We share the minimum necessary information with the services that make LitMark work:

• Anthropic (Claude) — processes your search questions, essay text, marking criteria (Hit the Mark) and questions you ask Vera, to generate results.
• OpenAlex, Semantic Scholar, Europe PMC, CORE — receive search queries to find relevant papers.
• Crossref and the DOI registry (doi.org) — receive the title, author, year or DOI of a source cited in an essay, so we can confirm it exists.
• Google — only if you click Accept on our cookie banner: your browser then loads Google's advertising script, which may set cookies. If you don't accept, nothing is loaded from Google.
• Stripe — processes payments and manages your subscription.
• Resend — sends login emails on our behalf.
• Render and Netlify — host our backend and frontend respectively.

We do not sell your personal information to anyone, for any reason.

Cookies and local storage

We use browser local storage (not traditional cookies) to keep you logged in and remember a few preferences. That is essential to how LitMark works and is always on.

We do not load any advertising or third-party tracking code unless you click Accept on our cookie banner. If you accept, your browser loads Google's advertising script, which may set cookies to personalise ads. You can change your choice at any time using "Cookie settings" in the footer, and rejecting has no effect on LitMark's core features.

We do not use session-recording or screen-replay tools, and we host our own fonts, so simply visiting LitMark does not send your details to a font provider.

Your rights

If you are in the UK or EU, you have rights under UK/EU GDPR including the right to access, correct, or delete your personal information, and to object to certain processing. To exercise these rights, contact us at the email below.

Data retention

We keep your account/subscription record for as long as your account is active. Search and essay content you submit is processed to generate a response and is not retained by us in a database afterwards, beyond standard, time-limited technical logs.

Children's privacy

LitMark is for people aged 18 and over. You must confirm you are 18 or over to subscribe, and we do not knowingly collect personal information from anyone under 18. If you believe someone under 18 has given us their details, contact us and we will delete them.

Changes to this policy

We may update this policy from time to time. We'll update the "Last updated" date above when we do.

Contact

Questions about this policy? Email litmarkcontactus@gmail.com.

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