The Jurism reference management system is an effort to provide the benefits of modern reference management technology to lawyers and multilingual scholars. None of the project’s tools or websites impose advertising on the user, user data is not shared with third parties, and where information is collected, it is deleted after serving its purpose. See below for specifics on information collected, and the purpose of collection.

Special Note on Cookies

Cookies are of particular concern to privacy-conscious users, so a special note on the way they are handled by the Jurism connectors is in order. Websites visited by the browser often set cookies for various purposes of their own, including the imposition of paywalls and other content restrictions. The Jurism Connector plugins have no control over these uses of cookies. However, in order to extract bibliographic information from pages visited in the browser, the Jurism Connectors must make an accessible and fully rendered image of the page internally. In order to to this, cookies associated with the page are replicated, together to other featurs of the page. This access to cookie data is done for that limited purpose only, the copied data is ephemeral, does not leave the user’s computer, and is not copied or otherwise shared with third parties.

System Elements

The system consists of six elements:

  • a library client installed on the user’s computer;
  • a distribution server that supplies automatic updates to the library client.
  • a debugging service to which users may voluntarily submit logs of the internal operation of the library client for examination by the Jurism developers;
  • connectors that enable web browsers to save bibliographic details from web pages to the library client;
  • integration plugins that support one-click insertion of references into word processor documents;
  • Zotero storage, an optional third-party service to which users may syncronize the content of the library client.

The collection and disposition of information in each of these elements is as follows:

Library Client

The library client itself is a standalone tool installed on the user’s computer that is as secure to outside access as the computer’s operating system.

Distribution Server

The library client is updated from time to time with bugfixes and new features. Unless disabled by the user, these updates operate by the library client polling a distribution server once per day, and installing updates when a fresh update is detected. These polling transactions are logged on the distributon server with their originating IP address. This information may be used to identify the number of unique installations of the library client exist in the field. IP addresses and other details contained in the log files are not and will not be shared with third parties, and the information is deleted after one month.

Debugging Service

For debugging purposes, the Jurism maintainers may invite a user to submit a “Debugging Report” logging the internal state of the library client during a problematic operation. These records contain no identifying information of the individual user, are not shared with third parties, and are deleted after two weeks.

Connectors

The browser connectors pass information on two channels. First, they rely on the library client to provide “translator” code to extract bibliographic information from web pages, and in return send bibliographic records to the library client for storage. These transactions take place within the user’s computer. Second, the connectors support word processor integration with the Google Docs service, which has a separate Privacy Policy.

Integration Plugins

The word processor integration plugins communicate with the library client to support one-click insertion of references in user documents. These transactions take place inside the user’s computer, and do not involve collection of data of any kind.

Zotero Storage

The cloud sync service Zotero Storage is maintained by the unaffiliated upstream parent of the Jurism project. The Zotero privacy policy is available at: https://www.zotero.org/support/privacy.