Digital Preservation

The Journal of Religion, Local Politics, and Law is committed to ensuring the long-term preservation, accessibility, and integrity of its digital scholarly content. We recognize that the permanent archiving of published research is a core responsibility to the academic community. Our comprehensive digital preservation strategy utilizes trusted systems to guarantee that all published articles remain available for future generations of scholars.

Archiving Partners & Systems

We actively participate in the following industry-leading digital preservation programs:

  1. LOCKSS / CLOCKSS:

    • Our journal is a proud participant in the CLOCKSS (Controlled LOCKSS) global archive. CLOCKSS is a not-for-profit, community-governed dark archive that preserves digital scholarly content on behalf of the worldwide academic community. In the unlikely event that content can no longer be made available from its primary source (e.g., the journal's website), CLOCKSS will "trigger" the preserved content and make it freely available as open access under a Creative Commons license.

    • We also support the LOCKSS (Lots of Copies Keep Stuff Safe) program, a decentralized preservation system run by libraries, which allows them to create and preserve a secure archive of the journal's content.

Why This Matters

  • Perpetual Access: Authors and readers can be confident that the published research will remain accessible permanently, independent of the journal's future operational status.

  • Integrity of the Scholarly Record: Archived content is preserved in its final published form, ensuring the integrity of citations and the historical record.

  • Compliance with Funder Mandates: Our archiving strategy helps authors comply with many research funders' requirements for long-term data and publication preservation.

Other Preservation Measures

In addition to participation in LOCKSS/CLOCKSS, we implement the following:

  • Persistent Identifiers: Every article is assigned a unique Digital Object Identifier (DOI) through our membership with Crossref. A DOI provides a permanent, resolvable link to the article's location online.

  • Institutional Repository Collaboration: We encourage and permit authors to deposit the final published PDF (Publisher's Version) in their institutional or subject-based repositories (e.g., arXiv, SSRN), often with an embargo period as specified in our copyright policy. This creates multiple, distributed copies of the work.

  • Regular Backups: The journal's publisher, in collaboration with our platform host, maintains secure, geographically distributed server backups of all website data and publication files.

For Authors, Librarians, and Readers

You can verify our participation in preservation systems:

  • Look for the CLOCKSS and LOCKSS logos on our journal website.

  • Our journal's entry in the CLOCKSS archive registry: [A link would typically be provided here, e.g., https://clockss.org/clockss/Journal_of_Religion_Local_Politics_and_Law].

  • Our Crossref membership ensures DOI persistence and facilitates metadata preservation across the scholarly ecosystem.

By implementing this multi-layered digital preservation strategy, the Journal of Religion, Local Politics, and Law fulfills its pledge to act as a permanent and reliable steward of the scholarly record in the fields of religion, politics, and law.

For more detailed information on our archiving policies, please contact the editorial office.