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Last updated: May 2026 Hexagraph is a high-performance scholarly metadata gateway built with your privacy in mind. This policy explains what information we collect, how we use it, and the rights you hold as a user or indexed researcher. We believe transparency is fundamental to trust — especially in a platform designed to serve the global research community.

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Overview

Hexagraph is committed to user privacy. We do not track you for advertising, and we do not sell your personal data. We are designed to catalog open research and public bibliometric information rather than harvest user activity. We design our architecture around privacy-by-default principles. Our search engine does not require user sign-ups or cookies that track your browsing habits across other sites. We believe that researchers should be able to explore the landscape of human knowledge freely and privately without creating a digital footprint that is monetized or tracked.
Our core privacy commitment: We do not track you for advertising. No API key account is required to use the Hexagraph platform.

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Information We Collect

We collect only the minimum necessary data to run the platform and keep it secure:
  • Usage Analytics: Anonymous metrics such as search query count, page views, and performance logs to optimize search speeds.
  • User Preferences: Local browser storage is used to save interface choices (e.g., light or dark mode theme).
  • Technical Identifiers: Temporary IP addresses are processed in server memory solely to prevent denial-of-service (DDoS) attacks and to enforce API rate limits.
When you run complex network visualization queries or side-by-side institution comparisons, the operational data is processed in-memory and is not linked to your IP address or browser fingerprint in our analytics databases. We only store aggregate, high-level metrics (such as the total number of searches per day) to help scale our server capacities.

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Scholarly Data Ingestion

Since Hexagraph is an academic index, we display public metadata about publications, author names, and university affiliations. This data is obtained under open licenses from providers like OpenAlex. The bibliometric data displayed on Hexagraph is retrieved from public catalogs that comply with Open Access standards. We do not store or process proprietary academic papers or paywalled publications. If you are an author whose publications are linked in public datasets, we index those public relationships (citations, co-authors, and subjects) without harvesting any of your non-academic personal data.

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Data Security & Encryption

All traffic between your browser and our servers is secured using SSL/TLS 1.3 encryption. Internal datastores are segmented, and user analytics log files are completely anonymized within 14 days of creation. We perform regular audits of our hosting environments to identify potential vulnerabilities. Our database structures use encrypted volumes, and backup copies of operational databases are securely isolated and encrypted. No payment details, personal profiles, or research documents are stored on our servers, which greatly reduces the target surface for potential security breaches.

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Your Rights (GDPR & CCPA)

If you are an author or researcher indexed on our platform, you have the right to request profile corrections or submit data portability/removal requests. To submit a request, contact us at privacy@hexagraph.org with the subject line “Data Correction/Removal”.
To exercise your data rights — including profile correction, portability, or removal — email us at privacy@hexagraph.org with the subject line “Data Correction/Removal”. Our data protection officers review all inquiries within 30 days.
In addition to correcting profiles, you can request that your author search indexes be hidden from public results if you believe your cataloged works are misattributed or if you wish to restrict the processing of your scholarly profile. Our data protection officers review all inquiries within 30 days, working closely with the primary open databases (such as OpenAlex) to ensure corrections propagate correctly throughout the academic ecosystem.