Archiving Policy

The Journal of Religion, Local Politics, and Law is committed to the permanent preservation and long-term accessibility of its scholarly content. We implement a robust, multi-layered archiving strategy to ensure the integrity and future availability of the complete published record, in line with our commitment to open science and enduring scholarly communication.

1. Digital Preservation with LOCKSS/CLOCKSS

Our primary and most critical preservation mechanism is participation in global, community-governed archiving programs:

  • CLOCKSS (Controlled LOCKSS): Our journal is archived in the CLOCKSS digital "dark archive." CLOCKSS is a not-for-profit, geographically distributed preservation infrastructure. In the event the journal can no longer be made available from its primary sources (a "trigger event"), the archived content in CLOCKSS will be made freely available to the world as open access, ensuring no research is ever lost.

  • LOCKSS (Lots of Copies Keep Stuff Safe): We also support the LOCKSS system, which allows participating libraries to create and preserve a secure, persistent cache of the journal's content. This decentralized network ensures redundancy and guards against data loss.

2. Persistent Identifiers

Every published article is assigned a unique and persistent Digital Object Identifier (DOI) through Crossref. This DOI provides a permanent, unbreakable link to the article's location online. Crossref's preservation capabilities ensure that even if URLs change, the DOI will always resolve to the correct, preserved content.

3. Self-Archiving (Author Permitted Archiving)

In alignment with our open access policy, we actively encourage and grant authors the right to self-archive their work:

  • Version: Authors may deposit the final published version (Version of Record/PDF) of their article.

  • Location: This can be done in institutional repositories, disciplinary repositories (e.g., SSRN, arXiv), or on personal academic websites.

  • Timing: There is no embargo period; self-archiving is permitted immediately upon publication.

  • Requirements: Proper attribution and a link to the article's DOI on the journal's official site must be provided.

This practice creates multiple, distributed copies of the work, greatly enhancing its preservation and accessibility.

4. Publisher's Internal Archiving

Our publishing platform and host maintain secure, automated, and geographically redundant backup systems for all journal data, including manuscripts, metadata, editorial records, and website infrastructure. These backups are performed regularly to prevent data loss from technical failures.

5. Metadata Preservation

Comprehensive article metadata (title, authors, abstracts, citations, etc.) is deposited with Crossref and other indexing services. This ensures the discoverability and scholarly record of the publication persist independently of the full-text files.

Our Commitment: This multi-pronged archiving policy—combining trusted third-party digital preservation (CLOCKSS/LOCKSS), persistent identifiers (DOI), empowered author self-archiving, and systematic internal backups—guarantees that research published in the Journal of Religion, Local Politics, and Law will remain a part of the permanent scholarly record for future generations.