Privacy policy

This document reflects the policy of the Irwin and Shoichet Labs, most recently updated in May 2024.

This policy spells out our procedures and the kind of data protection you can expect from us. We accept no responsibility for any data uploaded to our server. By using docking.org services you agree to do so at your own risk.

DOCK Blaster, ZINC, DUD, and other docking.org services are completely free public services, run on US-taxpayer-funded computers at a public university. Thus our bias is to be open.

Personal Identifying Information

We may retain your email address for authentication purposes (docking.org blog, Dockumentation wiki). We may also retain your email address for sending you periodic status updates on your jobs (DOCK Blaster and ZINC). We will not give your email address or any other information about you to anyone, except of course to US spy agencies as required by US law.

Duration of Project Data

Results of DOCK Blaster jobs that successfully complete "Calibration" will remain on our server for 28 days from the initial job start date. They may remain longer, but this is entirely at our discretion. We reserve the right to retain data on the server for illustration or debugging purposes.

Jobs that do not successfully complete "Calibration", and seem abandoned, may be deleted at our discretion after 24 hours.

Results of ZINC upload and subset requests and DOCK Blaster protonate requests remain on our server for seven days and cannot be PIN protected.

ZINC database searches and SEA searches are retained indefinitely, anonymously, for statistical purposes only.

Limited Privacy Option for DOCK Blaster jobs

You may protect your data for seven (7) days from the time of initial upload by using a project identification number (PIN). For seven days, no one will be able to see your uploaded data or calculated results without this PIN. Please connect to DOCK Blaster using https:// to be sure your PIN is encrypted in transit.

After 7 days, your PIN will be deleted and your data will be visible without limitation to anyone. If you wish your data to remain confidential, you must delete your data prior to the expiration of this 7 day period.

Only last 20 DOCK Blaster jobs displayed

The job monitor lists only recent jobs in the system (currently 20), so please keep your job ID number at hand. We do this to allow openness without the burden of a lengthy listing.

Any way around these restrictions?

You may request a private copy of DOCK, DOCK Blaster, and ZINC, and run them on your own servers. This is subject to licensing from the Regents of the University of California, and may not be free. You may also need to acquire licenses for a number of commercial products that are available from their respective vendors in order to use these tools as your site. Please ask us for details.

For instance, the engine behind DOCK Blaster, DOCK, may be licensed for free for academics and non-profits, and for a modest fee for commercial companies. DOCK licensing.

If you would like to make suggestions about these privacy policies, please write to comments at docking.org.