Privacy notice

1. What we collect

We collect personal data only when you choose to give it to us, by completing the contact form or the registration-of-interest form on this site. Those forms ask for:

• 01Your name — so we know who we are replying to.
• 02Your email address — so we can reply, or send you the publication link you asked for.
• 03Your institution (optional) — so we can route your enquiry to the right person.
• 04Your message and topic — the content of what you are asking us.

We do not ask for, and do not want, any special category data (for example health, political opinions, or religious beliefs). Please do not include such information in a message.

Separately, the site records how it is used. This is collected automatically, without you entering anything:

• Your IP address — recorded with each request, to rate-limit the forms and to keep the record honest about where a submission came from.
• Your browser’s user-agent string, and the page you arrived from if your browser sends it.
• What you did on the site — the pages you opened, the sections you scrolled to, the files you downloaded, the filters you used, and whether you exported a framework. A filter records which control was used and, for the search box, the length of the term only — never the words.
• A session identifier — a random value held in your browser’s sessionStorage and discarded when you close the tab. It groups one visit’s events together and identifies nothing about you.

We do not record what you type into any field, unless you press send. There is no tracking pixel, no advertising identifier, no cross-site tracking, and no profile of your browsing behaviour. If your browser sends Do Not Track or Global Privacy Control, none of the above is collected at all.

2. How we use it, and on what basis

We use the data you give us for one purpose only: to respond to your enquiry, or to send you the notification you asked for when the First Edition Handbook is published. We do not use it for marketing, we do not sell it, and we do not use it to build a profile of you.

Where the Personal Data (Privacy) Ordinance (Cap. 486) applies, we process this data on the basis of your consent, given when you tick the consent box before submitting a form. You may withdraw that consent at any time by writing to us; withdrawal does not affect anything we did before you withdrew it.

3. Who we share it with

A message sent through this site may be read by staff of the Office of Institutional Research and Planning at Hong Kong Baptist University and by members of the Elsevier Research Collaboration Unit, because the VBSA is a joint project between the two organisations.

We do not share your data with anyone else, and we do not transfer it outside those two organisations except where we are required to do so by law.

4. How long we keep it

Enquiry correspondence is kept for as long as needed to deal with your enquiry and for a reasonable period afterwards for record-keeping. Registration-of-interest details are kept until the First Edition is published and the notification has been sent, after which they are deleted.

Site-usage records are kept for 90 days, after which they are deleted. Form submissions — messages, registrations of interest and comments — are kept for two years, because they are the record of what the project was told and why it changed. Blocked addresses are kept for one year.

If you ask us to delete your data sooner, we will.

5. Cookies and third-party requests

This website sets no cookies. It stores one value in your browser's sessionStorage — the random session identifier described in section 1 — which is readable only by this site and is discarded when you close the tab. Nothing is written to localStorage. There are no advertising or social media embeds.

The administrator area sets one cookie, but only for whoever signs in to it. It is not set for ordinary readers and is not present on any page you can reach without signing in.

All assets — typefaces, stylesheets, scripts and images — are served from this site. There are no requests to third-party domains, which means no third party sees your IP address or browser details as a result of visiting this page. The typefaces are self-hosted copies of open-licensed fonts rather than a hosted font service.

This website is served over HTTPS in production. Standard server logs recording IP address, request time and requested URL may be kept by the hosting provider for security and operational purposes; these are not used to identify individuals.

6. Your rights

You have the right to:

• AAsk whether we hold personal data about you, and to be given a copy of it.
• BAsk us to correct anything that is inaccurate.
• CWithdraw your consent, and ask us to delete the data we hold about you.
• DObject to how we are handling your data, and complain to the Privacy Commissioner for Personal Data.

To exercise any of these, write to us using the contact details at the end of this notice. We will respond within 40 days.

7. Accessibility

We want this site to be usable by everyone who needs it. It is built with semantic HTML, keyboard-operable controls throughout, visible focus indicators, text alternatives for every chart and figure, and support for reduced-motion preferences.

If you meet a barrier we have missed — including anything that stops you reading the framework or the Handbook — please tell us and we will fix it. Accessibility issues are treated as defects, not requests.

8. Terms of use

The Handbook is licensed under Creative Commons Attribution 4.0 International (CC BY 4.0): you may share and adapt it provided the appropriate credit is given, a link to the licence is included, and any changes made are indicated. Third-party material is not covered by that licence unless otherwise stated. The framework figures published on this site may be downloaded for use in institutional documentation. The VBSA name and the partner logos remain the property of their respective owners and may not be used to imply endorsement of a product or service.

The framework is a work in progress, published as it develops. While we take care to keep the information here accurate, it is provided without warranty, and it is not a substitute for your own institutional judgement about how to evaluate scholarship.

9. Changes to this notice

We will update this notice when the way we handle data changes — in particular when the forms on this site are connected to a case-handling system. The date at the top of this page always shows the current version.

10. Contact

Questions about this notice, or requests about your data, should go to the VBSA team at the Office of Institutional Research and Planning, Hong Kong Baptist University.

contact@vbsarray.org

This notice describes this website. It is not legal advice, and the entity details and retention periods above should be confirmed by HKBU's data protection officer before the site is published.