Privacy notice
Last updated: October 2026
LARA (Legal Access to Research for Africa) helps researchers at African institutions get journal articles through legal routes. This notice explains what personal data we collect, why, and your rights. We follow the data protection laws that apply to our members, such as Nigeria's Data Protection Act 2023, Kenya's Data Protection Act 2019, Ghana's Data Protection Act 2012 and South Africa's Protection of Personal Information Act (POPIA).
What we collect
- Account: your email address and your password, used only to sign you in. Passwords are stored by our database provider in scrambled (hashed) form, so nobody at LARA can ever see them. If you use "Continue with Google", we receive only your name and email address from Google.
- Profile: the name, institution, country, city or region and field you enter, and whether you request papers or volunteer.
- Requests: the DOIs you request, notes you add, and the status of each request.
- Emails you send from LARA: when you use "Send from LARA", we pass your message, your name and your email address to our email provider so the message can be delivered and replies reach you. When a volunteer writes on your behalf and you have agreed to share your email, your address is added as a copy (cc) and the author's reply goes to you. We keep only a record that an email was sent (when, and for which request), not its text or the recipient's address.
- Notifications: if you leave notifications on, we email you when something changes on your requests. You can turn this off in My profile.
- Reports: if you report a problem, we keep what you wrote, your name if you are signed in, the email address you give for a reply (optional), and which screen you were on, your browser and your language, so the person who runs LARA can review it and reply. You can report a problem without signing in.
- Error records: if LARA crashes in your browser, it records the error message, the screen, your browser and your language, so we can fix it. It does not record your name, email or anything you typed. Repeated identical errors are counted, not stored again. To limit abuse, we keep a scrambled (hashed) form of your IP address for up to two days.
- Visit counts: like the rest of shagbaor.com, LARA counts page visits and button use with GoatCounter, which sets no cookies, stores no personal data and does not track you across websites. See the website privacy notice.
- On your device only: your language choice, light or dark mode and any papers you save are stored in your browser, not on our servers.
- DOI checks: the DOI you check and a short-lived record of how many checks you made in the past day (by account, or by IP address if you're not signed in), to keep within the free limits of the databases we use.
Why we use it
- To run the service: matching requests with volunteers and showing members who is asking and who is helping.
- To publish anonymous totals on the Impact page (numbers of requests, papers obtained, countries, institutions and fields). These never show names.
Our legal basis is your consent when you join, which you can withdraw at any time by asking us to delete your account.
Who can see it
- Signed-in members can see your profile name, institution, country, city or region and field, your requests and their notes.
- Your email address is never shown to other members, with one exception you choose: if you tick "Volunteers may copy my email address…" on a request, the volunteer helping with that request can see your email address and copy you into their letter to the author, so the author can reply to you directly. Only that one volunteer, only while the request is open. You can untick it at any time in My requests.
- Visitors who aren't signed in see only the anonymous totals.
Where it is stored
Data is stored with our database provider, Supabase, which may hold it outside your country. Emails sent from LARA go through our email provider (Brevo or Resend). DOIs (never your personal details) are sent to the open scholarly databases we search: Unpaywall, Crossref, OpenAlex, CORE, Europe PMC, Semantic Scholar, arXiv, DOAJ, DataCite and Zenodo.
How long we keep it
We keep your profile and requests while your account is active. Records of DOI checks are deleted after about a day. If you ask us to delete your account, we delete your profile, requests and notes.
The LARA browser extension
The extension does nothing until you click its icon or choose "Find on LARA" from the right-click menu. Then, and only on that page, it reads the article's DOI or title and opens LARA in a new tab with it. It does not read other pages, does not track your browsing, and does not collect, store or send any personal information. It has no access to your history, passwords or cookies.
Your rights
You can ask to see, correct, export or delete your data, or withdraw your consent, by writing to the site operator. You can also complain to the data protection authority in your country, for example the Nigeria Data Protection Commission, Kenya's Office of the Data Protection Commissioner, Ghana's Data Protection Commission or South Africa's Information Regulator.