Privacy notice — Founding Benchmark Fellow applications
Version landing-v1 · applies to applications submitted through this site.
Who we are
OpenRefinery (contact: contact@openrefinery.ai) is the controller of the information you submit in this application.
What we collect
What you enter in the form: name, email, country, university, degree stage, field, optional advisor and public profile links (Google Scholar, ORCID, arXiv, GitHub), your AI-tool use, your written answer, referral code, how you heard about us, and availability. We also record how you reached this page (campaign parameters), the time of submission, and — for abuse prevention — a hashed form of your IP address on our own pages.
What we use it for
- Assessing your application for the Founding Benchmark Fellow program and, if you progress, verifying your identity and institution, assigning and grading a work sample, and onboarding you as a contributor.
- Sending you transactional email about your application (confirmation, decisions, next steps). No marketing.
- Measuring which channels applications come from, in aggregate.
Automated screening — and how to get a human
The initial screen is partly automated. Fixed criteria are applied to your degree stage, field, and university, and a language model scores your written answer against a fixed, versioned rubric. Scores are taken as the median of 3 independent readings. Applications the automated step declines receive a decision email that says so. You have the right to ask for human review: reply to any decision email and a person will look at your application and the automated result. Borderline results and unmatched universities are always routed to a person, never auto-declined. We do not use this decision for anything beyond this program.
Who sees it
OpenRefinery staff who run the program. Our infrastructure providers (cloud hosting, transactional email, the language-model API used for scoring) process data on our behalf under contract; your written answer is sent to the model provider solely to be scored and is not used to train models. We do not sell personal data.
How long we keep it
Applications we cannot reach by email are closed and deleted after 14 days. Declined and expired applications are retained for 12 months for audit of our screening, then deleted. Contributor records are kept for the duration of the relationship and as required by law.
Your rights
You can ask us to export or delete your application at any time by emailing contact@openrefinery.ai from the address you applied with. If you are in the UK or EEA you also have rights to rectification, restriction, objection, and to lodge a complaint with your supervisory authority.
Changes
We record which version of this notice you accepted with your application. If the notice changes materially we will tell you by email.