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Privacy Statement 'Research Contribution Claim Network' project
Claims Network · last updated 16 July 2026
Introduction
SURF B.V. (hereafter: SURF or we) processes your personal data in the context of the Research Contribution Claim Network project and is therefore the data controller for your personal data within the meaning of the General Data Protection Regulation (GDPR).
Why and on what basis we process personal data
The 'Research Contribution Claim Network' is an innovation project of SURF in which we turn the public citation messages ("toots") that you send to our Claimbot (@claimbot@mas.to) into a structured, publicly published list of claims that link you as a person to the claimed work. We process and publish this data on the basis of your consent, i.e. the Claimbot processes your data after you have sent a toot to the Claimbot. By sending a toot to our Claimbot you give consent to participate in the project and to the processing of your data.
What personal data we process
- Your Mastodon handle.
- The content and the id of the toot you send to the Claimbot.
- Your Mastodon profile links (e.g. an InAcademia verification profile).
- The overview of the claimed works (yourself, the work, dates) and bibliographic metadata about the work.
How the data is published
Confirmed claims are public: they appear on per-researcher pages and in a downloadable
open dataset (an RDF dump) at mycontributions.info. The bot also posts a public
citation reply from its Mastodon account.
How long we keep it
| Data | Retention |
|---|---|
| Event / correlation cache | 30 days |
| Fetched bibliographic metadata | 30 days |
| Quarantined / failed messages | 30 days |
| Temporary processing files | 7 days |
| Published overview of claims | 30 days |
Third-party services
The Research Contribution Claim Network uses a Mastodon instance on which the Claimbot runs (mas.to) and your own Mastodon instance, which processes the toots. We also use the Zotero translator, an external bibliographic source, to describe and add metadata to cited works. This privacy statement does not apply to these services, and we recommend that you read the privacy statements of these services before using our demo environment.
What rights do you have?
Under the GDPR you can exercise a number of rights with regard to your personal data. These rights include the right to access the personal data we process about you and to have this data corrected if it is inaccurate. In addition, in some cases you have the right to have this data erased, to have it transferred to another party, to restrict the processing of your personal data, or to object to it.
You can withdraw your consent at any time by sending an email to claimbotdemo@surf.nl. We will remove your data from our storage and republish the dataset without your claims.
If you believe that SURF does not handle your personal data properly, you can file a complaint with SURF's Data Protection Officer. You also have the right to lodge a complaint about SURF with the Dutch Data Protection Authority (Autoriteit Persoonsgegevens). More information about the Autoriteit Persoonsgegevens and filing complaints can be found at www.autoriteitpersoonsgegevens.nl.
To exercise these rights, you can contact SURF using the contact details at the bottom of this privacy statement.
Changes to this statement
We may update this statement; the "last updated" date above reflects the current version.
SURF contact details
SURF B.V.
Moreelsepark 48
3511 EP, Utrecht
claimbotdemo@surf.nl
+31 88 787 3000
The contact details of our Data Protection Officer are fg@surf.nl.