In 2016, the European Union approved a new data privacy law called the General Data Protection Regulation (GDPR), which applies to all organisations that collect the personal data of EU citizens. While not directly affecting CKN, the international organisations providing content and services to CKN, such as EBSCO, Eduserv (Open Athens), Elsevier, BMJ, JAMA, Micromedex (IBM Watson Health), Springer, Taylor & Francis, Wiley etc have had to implement privacy protection and data handling policies and practices in line with the new European regulation.
Outwardly the changes needed to implement the GDPR my appear to be new wording in privacy policies. Behind the scenes, however, it has meant implementing new data handling and integrity process, IT / web security, data processing agreements, and legal frameworks such as EU-U.S. Privacy Shield and Swiss-U.S. Privacy Shield Frameworks.
This law became enforceable on May 25th 2018, with all changes required to be implemented by that day.
CKN does not envisage any disruptions as a result of GDPR changes, however if we become aware of access or outage problems we will work with the publisher to rectify access as soon as possible.