Your research stays yours.
ContributionArc exists to help you find your contribution — not to mine your scholarship. This page says, in plain language, what we store, who sees it, and how you take it with you or erase it.
What we store
- Your account: email address and a profile row created at sign-up.
- Your papers: projects, uploaded and imported sources, the conversation map, claim lattice, gaps, contribution and thesis work, and manuscript sections.
- Your scholarship: works you import (including via ORCID), corpus snapshots, and career-map narratives.
- Operational telemetry: a log of each AI run (task, engine, model, tokens, estimated cost, latency) — this powers your AI-use disclosure appendix and your spend limits. Prompts and outputs are not stored in that log.
Who receives what, and when
- Anthropic, OpenAI, Google (Gemini), Perplexity — during AI phases, they receive the material the task needs: your premise, thesis drafts, manuscript sections, and source excerpts. Nothing is sent until you run a phase.
- Tavus — when you start a defense rehearsal, your thesis architecture (title, contribution, central and supporting claims) primes the video committee member.
- OpenAlex, Crossref, Semantic Scholar — your ORCID, DOIs, and work titles, for citation verification and literature discovery. These are open scholarly indexes.
- Resend — your email address, to deliver magic sign-in links.
- Supabase & Vercel — our database/storage and hosting providers; your data lives there under row-level security scoped to your account.
All AI calls use commercial API tiers, which are not used to train the vendors’ models under their commercial terms — see Anthropic, OpenAI, Google Gemini, and Perplexity.
Retention
Your content persists until you delete it. Deleting a paper removes its uploaded files and every database row belonging to it. Deleting your account (below) removes your papers, files, scholarship data, and AI-run log. Removal of the sign-in identity record itself is completed on request — email kgranderson@mac.com — because that final step deliberately requires elevated credentials the app itself does not hold.
Your controls
- Export everything — download all of your rows (projects, sources, lattice, manuscripts, works, snapshots, AI runs) as JSON.
- Delete your account data — erases your files and every row you own, then signs you out.
- Questions — kgranderson@mac.com.
ContributionArc · Granderson Writing Academy · Last updated July 2026. Back home