First published: December 14, 2024
Last updated: January 2, 2025 - V1.1

The Holistic Innovation in Additive Manufacturing (HI-AM) 2.0 Project is committed to protecting your privacy and ensuring a safe online experience. This Privacy Policy explains how we collect, use, and share personal data provided during your interaction with our website, registration, abstract submission and evaluation, manuscript submission, peer review processes, and publication.

The HI-AM 2.0 Project and its associated event, the HI-AM Conference, are organized and led by faculty and staff affiliated with the University of Waterloo, and operate under the University’s privacy policy as overreaching guidelines.

When you submit an abstract or manuscript to the HI-AM Conference for consideration, we collect information such as your name, email address, affiliation, country, and biography (if you are a presenting author). You may voluntarily provide us with additional information such as middle initial, profile photo, social media profile, and ORCID iD. This data, along with your submitted work, are used exclusively for conference-related purposes, including abstract evaluation, manuscript review, and communication regarding the event. The HI-AM Conference utilizes Oxford Abstracts (OA) application to manage submissions, facilitate peer review, communicate with you regarding the status of your submission, and invite reviewers. If we send you an email through OA, we will be able to track whether the message has been opened. By submitting your data, you agree to the privacy practices outlined by OA. Please review their privacy policy here.

When you register for the HI-AM Conference, we collect information, such as your name, email address, job title, affiliation, country, dietary preferences, any special accommodation needs, and credit card. You may voluntarily provide us with additional information such as middle name, address, and phone number. Conference registration will be managed by the University of Waterloo Catering and Event Services. Secure third-party service providers will be used for credit card payment processing, and credit card information will not be shared with us as the organizers. A link to the applicable privacy policies will be provided through the registration portal.

We publish the HI-AM Conference Proceedings in an open-source format on the Open Journal Systems (OJS) platform by the Public Knowledge Project (PKP). You can sign up on our proceedings website to receive publication notifications. When you sign up, we will collect your name and email address. Please review the PKP’s privacy policy here.

We will use third-party service providers for badge generation and scanning. These providers may store certain information, including names, job titles, affiliations, countries, email addresses, phone numbers, and dietary requirements on their servers. Since service providers may vary by event, participants with concerns are encouraged to contact the organizers to request the current provider's privacy policy.

Your data, including abstracts and manuscripts, collected through OA, may be shared with editors, reviewers, and other conference organizers as needed for the peer review process, as well as with conference chairs and session coordinators for session management. Only the required information will be shared with each group based on their role and activity.

Some of the data collected during registration, including your name, email address, job title, affiliation, and country, may be used to notify you about future conferences or shared with exhibitors and event managers of activities co-located with the HI-AM Conferences, such as university lab tours, but only if you have given explicit consent for each specific use during registration.

The names and email addresses entered in the HI-AM Conference Proceedings website will be used exclusively for sending publication notification and will not be made available for any other purpose or to any other party.

We may contact you at a future point to invite you to consider taking part in research being conducted by faculty in the University of Waterloo, serving as a HI-AM Conference reviewer or associate editor, joining HI-AM advisory committees, or delivering invited presentations at HI-AM events. Being contacted does not commit you to any specific activity; you can decide on your involvement for each opportunity when contacted. In case of a research collaboration, your name, contact information, job title, affiliation, and field of expertise will only be shared with the faculty member leading the relevant research at the University of Waterloo, as needed. You can request not to be contacted for these purposes at any time by emailing us at hiam@uwaterloo.ca. Please note that before any studies are conducted, they are reviewed and receive ethics clearance through a University of Waterloo Research Ethics Board.

We retain all information submitted via OA, along with review details, comments, decisions, and commutations related to your submissions. This data is retained for as long as necessary for archiving purpose and to address potential disputes or violations of conference ethical guidelines and publication standards.

Your personal information submitted through the registration portal will be retained only as long as necessary to provide the services and complete the transactions. After each conference concludes and all transaction and accounting processes are finalized, your data will be deleted. If you have opted to receive communication about future events, we will retain your name, email address, phone number, job title, and country until the data is no longer necessary, or you withdraw consent.

While the HI-AM website does not directly use cookies, we may feature third-party services, plugins, and embedded content that may set cookies on your device. These third parties may use the following types of cookies to collect data about your interactions with their content on our website:

• Functional cookies
• Marketing/tracking cookies
• Statistics/analytics cookies

By using our website, you acknowledge that third-party services may collect cookies as described above. Since third-party cookies are set by external services and not directly by us, we do not have control over how these services use your data. However, you can manage your cookie preferences through the settings of the third-party services themselves, your browser settings, or the consent management pop-up on this website.

For information on how to manage cookies for specific third-party services, you can visit their respective cookie policies:

• WordPress (Functional)
• Complianz (Functional)
• Google Fonts, Google Maps, Google Analytics, and YouTube (Marketing/Tracking, Statistics/Analytics)
• X (Twitter) (Marketing/Tracking)