What the connector receives, and what it keeps
This page describes what the software behind mcp.smartscholars.in actually does. It adds to Smart Scholars' privacy page for all our sites, smartscholars.in/privacy.php, which applies here too.
When you use a check (check_journal, check_doi)
Your AI assistant sends us the ISSN, website address or DOI you asked about — nothing else from your conversation. We ask the public registers about it: Crossref (with our contact address, as Crossref asks), DOAJ, OpenAlex and doi.org; for a website address we read that one page of the journal's site to find its ISSN. Their answers stay in the server's memory for up to a day, so the same question is not asked of them twice; they are not written to disk and carry nothing about who asked. Our service log notes which tool ran, whether it worked and how long it took (for a help request, its reference number and whether the mail went), and the technical details of any fault — not what was asked.
When you ask Smart Scholars for help (ask_smart_scholars)
Your name, e-mail address, journal or website (if you give one) and message, with the time, a reference number and the name your assistant's software gives itself, are written to a file on our server that only the connector and the server's administrators can read, and are e-mailed to Smart Scholars at mou@smartscholars.in. We use them to answer you and for nothing else. They are kept while they are useful for answering you, or until you ask us to delete them.
Limits against floods
To keep the service fair we count requests by a one-way code made from the internet address they come from — for an AI assistant usually the assistant's own servers — never the address itself, and help requests also by a one-way code made from the e-mail address. The codes live only in the server's memory and are gone when the service restarts. The web server in front of the connector keeps ordinary access logs (the address of the request, the time, the page) for a short time, for security.
What we never do
- No cookies, no tracking, no advertising, no sign-in.
- We do not sell or share what you send, and do not use it to train anything.
- We do not read your conversation: only what your assistant puts into a tool call reaches us. Your assistant's provider (for example Anthropic or OpenAI) handles the conversation itself under its own terms.
Your data, and who answers
Write to us and we will tell you what we hold about you, send you a copy, correct it, or delete it. Questions about how we handle personal data are answered by Rahul Raj Akkali, Authorised Signatory, for Smart Scholars, at mou@smartscholars.in. See also how to have your data deleted.
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