☰
The Only Good Antibodies Community (OGA) is committed to protecting your privacy in accordance with the UK General Data Protection Regulation (UK GDPR) and the Privacy and Electronic Communications Regulations (PECR). This policy outlines how we collect, use, and safeguard your personal data when you use this website.
Last updated: July 2026
This website is operated by the Only Good Antibodies Community, based at the University of Leicester. For any queries, contact us at:
Email: onlygoodantibodies@gmail.com
We collect and process personal data when you interact with our website, including:
- Information you provide via contact forms (name, email address, message content).
- Account information if you register for the OGA Academy (username, email address).
- Information you enter into our Manuscript Validation Checker (author name, email, institution, antibody/reagent details, and any control images you upload).
- The plan you build with the Antibody & Controls Selection Tool (your target, technique, controls and notes) and — if you save it as a compliance record — your name, institutional email and institution.
- Messages you type into our AI assistant (see “AI-powered features” below).
- Anonymous usage data collected through our analytics service (see below).
We use Plausible Analytics to understand how our website is used. Plausible is a privacy-friendly analytics service that:
- Does not use cookies.
- Does not collect personal data.
- Does not track individuals across websites.
- Processes all data in the EU.
Because Plausible does not use cookies or collect personal data, no consent is required under PECR or UK GDPR. All data collected is aggregate and anonymous — we can see how many people visited a page, but not who they are.
Organisations we have issued an API key to — manufacturers, registries and data partners — query our data through the data API. We keep a running count of those requests: how many, to which endpoint, on which day, for each key. The key belongs to an organisation, not to a person, and we do not record who within that organisation made a request or what any request contained.
Requests to the API that arrive without a usable key are counted too, as a daily total per endpoint, with no record of who sent them — no address, no identifier, nothing that could single anybody out.
We use these counts to understand how the data is used and to spot a client stuck in a loop before it affects the site.
This website uses only strictly necessary cookies that are required for core functionality. These do not require consent under PECR.
| Cookie | Purpose | When Set |
|---|---|---|
| sessionid | Maintains your login session in the OGA Academy | When you log in |
| csrftoken | Protects against cross-site request forgery attacks | On form pages |
These cookies are deleted when you close your browser or after 8 hours of inactivity. We do not use any analytics, advertising, or tracking cookies.
If you register for the OGA Academy, we store your username, email address, quiz progress, and certificate records. This data is necessary to provide the e-learning service and issue certificates. You can request deletion of your account and associated data at any time by contacting us.
Our Antibody & Controls Selection Tool helps you choose an antibody and the controls to validate it, and produces a downloadable plan (PDF). When you save a plan, we store it as a record with a unique reference code. You choose what the record is for:
- A compliance record. This is attributable to you and requires your name, institution and institutional email. Because its purpose is to evidence good practice to the body that asked you to use the tool, we may share this record — the plan together with your name, institution and email — with that funder or organisation (for example Cancer Research UK / Cancer Research Horizons, or the NC3Rs). You are recording your plan precisely so that it can be shared for this purpose.
- “Just for me” (a personal plan). This needs no name or affiliation, is for your own use, and is not offered to any funder as evidence. You may still add your name for your own reference.
You can ask us to delete a saved record at any time by quoting its reference code to onlygoodantibodies@gmail.com.
When you submit the contact form or the Manuscript Validation Checker, the details you enter — and, for the validation checker, any control images and the generated PDF/JSON — are sent to the OGA team by email so we can respond or process your record. We do not store these submissions in a database and we do not use them for marketing.
Some features use a third-party AI service (Anthropic, provider of the Claude models) to generate responses:
- The OGA Academy AI assistant sends the messages you type to Anthropic to produce a reply. We keep only a per-day message count on our server; the conversation itself is not stored by us.
- The “connect your own AI” option lets you use our database from your own AI tool (e.g. Claude or ChatGPT). Anything you paste there is processed by your AI provider under their terms, not ours.
Please do not paste confidential or personal data into AI features. Anthropic acts as our data processor and, under our business terms, does not use your inputs to train its models.
To enrich what you type, some tools query external scientific databases. These lookups send only the identifier you enter (a gene symbol or an RRID) — never your name or contact details:
- Gene symbols are sent to UniProt and public expression datasets (e.g. DepMap) to map the protein and show where it is expressed.
- RRIDs are checked against the SciCrunch Antibody Registry.
Registration and password-reset pages are protected by Google reCAPTCHA to prevent automated abuse. This is subject to Google’s Privacy Policy and Terms of Service.
We use collected data to:
- Provide and improve website functionality.
- Deliver the OGA Academy e-learning service and the antibody selection, validation and AI-assistant tools you use.
- Monitor aggregate site performance and usage patterns.
- Respond to contact form enquiries.
- Ensure website security.
We do not sell your personal data or use it for advertising. We share it only in these specific circumstances:
- With your funder or organisation, when you choose to save a compliance record in the Selection Tool (as described above) — that is the record’s purpose.
- With the service providers that operate features on our behalf (our AI provider Anthropic, Google reCAPTCHA, and the reference databases above), strictly to deliver the function you asked for.
- Where required by law.
Under UK GDPR, you have the following rights over your personal data:
- Right to access your data.
- Right to rectification (correcting inaccurate data).
- Right to erasure (deletion of your data).
- Right to withdraw consent where consent was given.
- Right to object to data processing.
- Right to data portability.
To exercise any of these rights, contact us at onlygoodantibodies@gmail.com.
This policy may be updated to reflect legal or website changes. The most recent version will always be available on this page.