Takedown Policy
Last updated: 2026-10-31.
When a record is removed
Records are not deleted. The only exception is removal required by law, such as copyright infringement or exposure of personal data. A record is also removed when an author shows that they did not agree to the listing and the work cannot be withdrawn under the Withdrawal Policy.
How to ask
To request removal for legal reasons, open a removal issue. Do not include personal data in the issue. Describe where the problem is, without repeating the material itself. Say how you are concerned: as an author, as the rights holder, as the person whose data appears, or on their behalf.
Requests are welcome from any country, in English or Japanese. A request may rest on the law of the requester's country, such as a copyright notice under the law of the United States or a request under the data protection law of the European Union. The operator considers it under this policy and under Japanese law, and takes the material offline when either requires it.
The site is served by Vercel, and the repository and its issues are kept on GitHub, both in the United States. A request can also go to GitHub, for example as a copyright notice under its own process, or to Vercel. They decide under their own terms; the operator decides on Sophaxis under this policy, whatever they decide. Where the operator removes material, it also asks GitHub to remove it from the repository history when the law requires it, as set out below.
A request that cannot be made in public goes by email to the address on the operator's ORCID record. The address is kept there, not on this site. The operator then takes the abstract and the PDF copy offline while the request is reviewed.
What happens
The operator aims to answer each request within 7 days. For personal data and other serious harm, the abstract and the PDF copy are taken offline at once, before the decision. The authors are told in their submission issue and can respond. This notice-and-response procedure follows the approach of Japanese law on the liability of providers of online services: the person whose material is concerned hears of the request and can answer before a decision, except where serious harm requires the material to be taken offline at once.
If the request is upheld, the record page is replaced by a notice that keeps only the Sophaxis id, the date and the kind of reason. The address keeps working, so that citations lead to the notice instead of to nothing. The title, the authors, the abstract and the PDF copy are removed from the site. Where the law requires it, the operator also asks GitHub to remove the material from the repository history. The operator also asks the Internet Archive to exclude its earlier copies of the record.
If the request is not upheld, the operator says why in the issue.
The work in its repository
Sophaxis cannot remove a work from Zenodo, Figshare or any other repository. A request about the deposit itself goes to that repository.