This privacy policy and legal notice is specific to the Oxford Digital Reference Shelf and overrides any other privacy policy or legal notice appearing elsewhere on Oxford University Press websites.

Oxford University Press (OUP) is committed to protecting your privacy online. Our policy explains how we will do this. We will review this policy in the light of comments we receive so please check the latest version. If you have any questions about our privacy policy please contact us.

By using the Oxford Digital Reference Shelf, you are accepting the practices described in this statement.

When you ask for information about the Oxford Digital Reference Shelf, or purchase one or more Titles from the Oxford Digital Reference Shelf, we ask for your name, email address, postal address, and other relevant personal information. Personal information submitted in this way is added to our access control database, hosted by a third party hosting company, and to our customer databases at OUP. This information will be updated if you inform us of any changes.

We may use information in our customer databases to send you information about us and our products which we think may be of interest to you, both electronically and otherwise. If you have purchased hosting services from OUP, your personal information will also be used to enable us to verify you are entitled to access the Oxford Digital Reference Shelf.

We request personal information (such as your name, email address and other contact details) from you when you contact us with customer service queries, technical problems, to comment on the Oxford Digital Reference Shelf, or when you ask for information about how to use the service. Personal information submitted by you via contact us will not be added to our customer database and we request it simply so that we can respond to you about your query. Statistics regarding the types of queries submitted to us via contact us may be collated by us in aggregate form so that we can effectively monitor the Oxford Digital Reference Shelf and improve levels of service. When you use the "Email this entry" feature in the Oxford Digital Reference Shelf (only available if you have chosen Oxford's hosting service), we also request information about the email address/es for the recipient/s of the emailed entry, as well as the sender's name (the sender's email address is optional). Any personal information submitted by you via "Email this entry" will not be added to our customer database or retained by us and we request these details simply so that you can email the entry and so that the recipient knows who has sent the entry to them.

If you have asked for information, or have purchased one or more Titles from the Oxford Digital Reference Shelf and no longer wish to use them and do not wish us to store information about you, please contact us and we will remove your details from our customer database. We need to store information about current customer in order to fulfil our contractual requirements to you and in order to deliver the Oxford Digital Reference Shelf to you.

Unless you have informed us that you do not wish to receive further information about our products, we may send you direct mail.

You may notify us either in writing or by telephone, fax or email that you object to being contacted in a particular stated way. If you use more than one email address to communicate with us, please notify us of each email account you use.

We do not sell your personal information to others.

We share your information within OUP and our affiliates.

The Oxford Digital Reference Shelf has been developed by and (where applicable) hosted by third parties but we have agreed with those third parties that they will keep your information secure and not use it for other purposes.

We have links to non-Oxford University Press websites on our site. If you visit these sites, they may collect information, and such sites are not within our control and are not covered by this privacy statement.

If we believe that your use of the Oxford Digital Reference Shelf is unlawful or damaging to others, we reserve the right to disclose the information we have obtained through the site about you to the extent that it is reasonably necessary in our opinion to prevent, remedy or take action in relation to such conduct.

This policy applies if you have chosen Oxford's hosting service.

Cookies are small files that we create to store information on your computer. Cookies contain information including details of the pages you visit. We do not use cookies to track what other sites you have visited, nor do we track any personal or confidential information about you.

The default policy will be to use cookies for authentication. However, users may choose to disable cookies and will still be able to use the service, but usage statistics related to user sessions will not be available.

Your personal information is stored at a data centre controlled by our third party hosting company (if you use Oxford's hosting service) and on the customer database at OUP. The data centre controlled by our third party hosting company is specifically designed to be physically secure and to admit authorized personnel only, who are contractually bound to keep all of our data confidential.

Access to our customer databases at OUP is only given to those of our employees who need such access in order to carry out necessary processing of your account.

All personal information submitted by you and entered by Oxford University Press into the Oxford Digital Reference Shelf access control system is encoded using 128-bit SSL encryption before being sent over the Internet.

Under the licence signed by the purchase of an Oxford Digital Reference Shelf Title, you are permitted to:

Under the licence signed by the purchaser of an Oxford Digital Reference Shelf Title, you may NOT:

All materials on the Oxford Digital Reference Shelf are the copyright of OUP or are reproduced with permission from other copyright owners. All rights are reserved. Oxford Digital Reference Shelf materials may be retrieved and downloaded solely for personal use. No materials may otherwise be copied, modified, published, broadcast or otherwise distributed without the prior written permission of OUP, OUP, Oxford and/or any other names of products or services provided by OUP and referred to on the Oxford Digital Reference Shelf are either trademarks or registered trademarks of OUP.

OUP makes no warranties or representations of any kind concerning the accuracy or suitability of the information contained on the Oxford Digital Reference Shelf for any purpose. All such information is provided "as is" and with specific disclaimer of any warranties of merchantability, fitness for purpose, title and/or non-infringement. OUP makes no warranties or representations of any kind that the Oxford Digital Reference Shelf will be uninterrupted, error-free, or that the Oxford Digital Reference Shelf or the server that hosts the Oxford Digital Reference Shelf are free from viruses or other forms of harmful computer code. In no event shall OUP, its employees or agents be liable for any direct, indirect or consequential damages resulting from the use of the Oxford Digital Reference Shelf. This exclusion and limitation only applies to the extent permitted by law and is without prejudice to any express provisions to the contrary in any written licence or subscription agreement from OUP in respect of the use of the Oxford Digital Reference Shelf provided via this website.

The titles included in the Oxford Digital Reference Shelf may include some words which have or are asserted to have proprietary status as trade marks or otherwise. Their inclusion does not imply that they have acquired for legal purposes a non-proprietary or general significance nor any other judgement concerning their legal status. In cases where the editorial staff have some evidence that a word has proprietary status this is indicated in the entry for that word but no judgement concerning the legal status of such words is made or implied thereby.