ESTS GDPR Statement

Members

The European Society for Textual Scholarship (hereafter ‘the Society’) collects and holds the following personal details for each of its members: 

  • Full name
  • Email address
  • Academic affiliation

Accordingly, no special categories of personal data, such as ‘Sensitive Personal Data’ is collected or processed. The Society collects and stores these data specifically and solely for the purpose of fulfilling its obligations to its Membership, namely provide them with information on:

  • the Society’s upcoming annual conference;
  • the appointment of new Officers of the Board;
  • changes that are proposed to the Bylaws;
  • changes that are made to this GDPR Statement;
  • any other decisions made by the Board that may concern the Membership;

and to organise (and communicate the results of) votes and elections in which the Members are eligible to participate. In addition, the Society may also use this information to remind its Members to renew their Membership, and to warn them when their personal information will be removed from its records. Finally, Society may also use this information to notify the Members when a new Issue of or Call for Papers for the Society’s journal Variants is ready to be distributed. 

These data are collected: 

  • through the local organization committees of the Society’s annual conference, which forward the relevant data of newly registered members to the Society’s Board;
  • through the bank statements of other Membership Fees paid to the Society’s PayPal or bank accounts that are collected by the Society’s Treasurer; and
  • when non-members offer this information freely, by contacting a Member of the Board for this purpose.

These data are entered into a secure, GDPR compliant email environment, and the Society’s Secretary will keep a list of the Society’s Membership on a local file for the Society’s records.

Emails to the Society’s Members will always be sent using Blind Carbon Copy so as not to distribute these data further than necessary. Access to this environment (and the data that are held within) is limited to Board Members that are appointed as Officers at the time. These data will remain in the Society’s records indefinitely, until the Member in question requests their removal. 

Members hold the right to request a copy of the data the Society holds on them, to change their data, and to have their data removed from the Society’s records. Members also reserve to right have their email addresses taken out of rotation at any point, so as not to receive any of the above mentioned Society and Journal related emails. 

Personal data will not be transferred outside of the EU, and will not be disclosed to third parties. The Society’s Officers are the only persons who have access to these data, and will only use them to serve the above-mentioned purposes.

Non-members

Non-members have the possibility to subscribe to Membership emails by volunteering their information to a member of the Board. Their data will be treated in the same way as those of the Society’s Members. 

Financial Records for Membership Fees

Membership fees are either paid by registering for one of the Society’s annual conferences, or by depositing a Membership Fee to the Society’s PayPal or bank account (as explained on https://textualscholarship.eu/membership/). Members should be aware that by paying their Fees through these applications (such as PayPal and other bank transfer applications) they are agreeing to the Terms and Conditions of those applications, and that the Society cannot guarantee their protection. Nevertheless, Members can be assured that all bank information and other financial records that should reach the Society’s Treasurer through these means will not be collected, nor distributed to (nor outside of) the rest of the Society’s Board outside of their relevance to update the Board on the current state of the Society’s finances.

The Society’s Online Presence

The Society maintains a Facebook Group and a Twitter account. Besides these Social Media accounts, the Society also hosts a WordPress website, and co-hosts a mailing list together with its North-American sister Society STS (the Society for Textual Scholarship). The third-party companies that provided these services (Facebook, Twitter, WordPress, JISC) may track our Members’ personal and browsing information as they interact with them (e.g. by following our social media accounts; by liking, sharing, retweeting our posts; by visiting our website, and by subscribing to our emails). As these third parties have their own Terms of Agreement with their users, the Society is not responsible for the way in which that information is used. We encourage Members who do not wish to provide this information to those third parties to avoid initiating accounts with their services (or to permanently delete them if they already exist), to use privacy-oriented tools and browsers, and invite them to ask one of the Society’s Board Members to keep them in the loop regarding information that is communicated through these media – insofar as they are not communicated through the Society’s emails to its Members. 

Point of Contact

For further questions about your data, or to initiate the process of removing your data from our records, or your email address from our contact list, please contact a member of the Society’s Board. Specifically, we recommend contacting the Society’s current Secretary. To find out who currently presides in the Society’s board, and which Offices they occupy, please visit: https://textualscholarship.eu/board/.