Open Editors Plus lists named individuals and an algorithmically inferred attribute about them, so it processes personal data. Its purpose is academic research — a scientometric study of the composition of academic editorial boards. This page explains what the dataset contains, who is responsible for it, the legal basis for collecting and publishing it, who receives the data, and how a listed person can correct or remove their record.

What data Open Editors Plus contains

Each record describes one editorial-board position and the person who holds it. Almost every source field is information the journals themselves have already published on their public editorial-board pages — professional information about people acting in a public scholarly role, not private or contact data. (A few values, such as some ORCID iDs, instead come from public researcher registries.) The personal fields are:

Name (and a parsed first/last name), editorial role, and the journal and publisher.
Institutional affiliation as listed, canonicalised against the Research Organization Registry (institution, country, city, coordinates).
ORCID iD, where the journal published one or a public registry supplied it.
Public bibliometric indicators (h-index, publication and citation counts, academic age) from OpenAlex.
An inferred gender attribute (see the caveat below).

The dataset does not collect private contact details, home addresses, dates of birth, or any special-category data such as health, ethnicity, religion, or political opinion. Race/ethnicity inference was computed for internal validation only and is deliberately excluded from the public release. The full column-by-column documentation is in the codebook, and every collection and enrichment step is described in the methodology.

Data controller & contact

Open Editors Plus is an independent research project. The data controller — the person who determines why and how the data are processed, and who is solely responsible for this dataset — is:

Basile Chrétien (PharmD, MSc, MPH)
ORCID 0000-0002-7483-2489
Neuropresage Team (PhIND, UMR-S U1237), Normandie Université, UNICAEN, INSERM, GIP Cyceron, Caen, France

Basile Chrétien carries out this work as a researcher within the Neuropresage Team, which grounds its academic-research purpose and legal basis. He determines the purposes and means of the processing and acts as the data controller within the meaning of Art. 4(7) GDPR. This is an independent, personal research project: it is not an official output of, and is not published by, Normandie Université, UNICAEN, INSERM or GIP Cyceron. Correction, removal, and objection requests should be sent to the contact below.

Data-protection contact: email address

The dataset is deposited permanently on Zenodo (DOI 10.5281/zenodo.19590816). A working contact address will be kept published here for the life of that public deposit, so the route to correction or removal outlives any single account.

Legal basis

Collection and publication take place in France (EU), where Basile Chrétien is a researcher within the Neuropresage Team (Normandie Université, UNICAEN, INSERM).

Collection (copyright & text-and-data mining)

Editorial-board pages are gathered under the scientific-research text-and-data-mining (TDM) exception introduced by Article 3 of the EU Directive on Copyright in the Digital Single Market (2019/790) and transposed into French law in the Code de la propriété intellectuelle — Art. L.122-5-3 for copyright and Art. L.342-3 for the sui generis database right. This exception lets a research organisation reproduce and extract, for the purposes of scientific research, works and databases to which it has lawful access; it cannot be set aside by contract. The factual content the dataset actually retains — names, roles, and affiliations — is moreover not protected by copyright; the EU does recognise a sui generis database right over publishers' compilations, but extracting from them for scientific research is permitted by the TDM exception above, so the extraction is not restricted on database-right grounds. Only publicly accessible pages are used; no login-gated, paywalled, or licensed content is collected.

Personal data (GDPR)

Because the records identify people, the processing is also governed by the EU General Data Protection Regulation (GDPR) and the French loi n° 78-17 Informatique et Libertés. The data are processed for scientific research — a scientometric study of editorial-board composition. The lawful basis is the controller's legitimate interests in carrying out and publishing that research (Art. 6(1)(f)), balanced against the interests of the people described; that balance is favourable here because the records contain only professional information about people acting in a public scholarly role, already published by the journals themselves. The processing applies the research safeguards of Art. 89(1) — data minimisation, no automated decisions about individuals, and exclusion of special-category data.

Because the data are not obtained directly from the individuals, this notice — together with the public codebook and dataset — provides the Art. 14 transparency information. Publishing the dataset openly is the communication of academic-research results (a versioned, DOI-cited scientometric dataset); the accompanying duty of care toward the people listed is met by using professional information only, excluding special-category data, flagging inferred fields with per-record confidence, and offering the free correction, objection, and removal route below.

For the collection and enrichment methods this legal basis applies to, see the methodology.

The inferred-gender attribute

The gender field is algorithmically inferred from the editor's first name and country of affiliation using the World Gender Name Dictionary 2.0 (WGND 2.0). It resolves to female, male, or unknown for editors in this release (the schema also carries a legacy androgynous code that the current method does not emit); it is not self-reported gender identity, and it can be wrong for any given individual.

Under the GDPR, sex/gender is not "special-category data" within the meaning of Art. 9 (which covers data such as health, ethnic origin, religion, or sexual orientation), so the attribute does not trigger the special-category regime. We nonetheless flag it as inferred throughout the dataset (with a per-record confidence weight, sample size, and provenance) and treat it as correctable and removable on request like any other field. The coverage and accuracy limits of this method are documented in the methodology.

Open release & licence

Open Editors Plus is released into the public domain under CC0 1.0. It is important to be precise about what that does and does not do:

CC0 waives copyright and database rights only. It does not — and legally cannot — waive the data-protection rights of the individuals the records describe. Anyone who reuses the data remains responsible for complying with the data-protection law that applies to them (in particular the EU's GDPR). CC0 removes the licensing friction of reuse; it does not remove a downstream user's own legal obligations toward the people in the data.

The GDPR governs this publication directly (see the legal-basis section above): the processing relies on the controller's legitimate interests in academic research (Art. 6(1)(f)) together with the research safeguards in Art. 89(1), and this notice serves as the Art. 14 transparency information.

Open Editors Plus extends the peer-reviewed Open Editors dataset (Nishikawa-Pacher, Heck & Schoch), which was likewise released under CC0.

Who receives the data, and for how long

Enrichment queries. To build each record, names and affiliation strings are sent to public third-party APIs — the Research Organization Registry (ROR) and OpenAlex — which return institutional and bibliometric metadata; journal titles and ISSNs are matched against public indexing lists.

Open redistribution. The finished dataset is published openly on Zenodo under CC0, from which anyone worldwide may download and redistribute it. Personal data therefore crosses borders by design: the controller is in France (EU), the enrichment APIs are US-based (so building a record can involve a transfer of already-public professional data outside the EU, under Chapter V of the GDPR), the Zenodo archive is hosted in the EU (CERN), and the files are downloadable globally.

Retention. Records are kept for as long as the project is maintained. Because Zenodo is a permanent, versioned public archive, published versions persist indefinitely; a correction or removal takes effect from the next version onward. See the honest note on the corrections page about copies that others may already have downloaded.

Your rights

If you are listed in Open Editors Plus, you can ask us to correct your record, remove it entirely, object to (or request that we cease) the processing, or ask what we hold about you — though every field is already public in the open dataset and codebook. No reason is required and there is no charge. Under the GDPR these are the rights of access (Art. 15), rectification (Art. 16), erasure (Art. 17), restriction (Art. 18), and objection (Art. 21).

Corrections, removal & data rights

You may also raise a request or a data-accuracy report directly with the data-protection contact: email address.

If you are not satisfied with how a request is handled, you can complain to a data-protection authority — in France, the Commission Nationale de l'Informatique et des Libertés (CNIL) (Art. 77 GDPR); EU residents may also contact their own national supervisory authority.

About this website

This notice concerns the dataset. The website itself uses GoatCounter, a cookieless, privacy-friendly analytics service — no cookies, no cross-site tracking, only aggregate visit counts.

Privacy & Data Protection