If a journal shuts down, your article survives only in the copies held outside it. The DOI and its Crossref metadata record survive, but the DOI points at a page on the publisher's own site, so no identifier can revive a dead website. Directive Publications is not enrolled in any named preservation archive, and we say so plainly.
Every author should put this question to a publisher before submitting. We are answering it without being asked. Our answer covers what a DOI guarantees, why a backup is not preservation, and where our own gap sits.
What a DOI guarantees if a journal shuts down, and what it does not
A DOI is a persistent identifier attached to a metadata record held by a registration agency, not by the publisher. Ours are registered with Crossref under the prefix 10.52338. Crossref holds the record for each article — the title, the authors, the journal and the publication details — and the web address the DOI points at. The identifier lives at Crossref; the page at the end of the link lives on our servers.
| Component | Who holds it | If we stopped operating |
|---|---|---|
| The DOI string | Crossref | Continues to exist; it is not deleted when a publisher closes |
| The metadata record | Crossref, plus every service that has harvested it | Continues to exist, searchable and citable |
| The address the DOI resolves to | The Crossref record, kept current by the publisher | Still points at our domain; if the domain lapses the link breaks |
| The full-text page and PDF | Us | Goes offline with the site, unless a copy exists elsewhere |
| Your deposited copies | You and your repository | Unaffected |
A registered DOI is evidence that an article was published, and it carries the metadata deposited for it. A DOI is not a promise that anyone can still read it.
Backup and preservation are two different jobs
A backup is a copy the publisher keeps for its own recovery, restored by the publisher, after an event the publisher survives: a failed disk, a bad deployment, a ransomware incident.
Digital preservation is a copy held by an independent organisation under a written agreement that lets that organisation publish the content if the publisher no longer can.
| Question | Backup | Preservation archive | Distributed metadata |
|---|---|---|---|
| Who holds the copy? | The publisher | An independent third party | Crossref and every harvester |
| What triggers its use? | Data loss the publisher recovers from | The publisher ceasing to operate | Nothing; it is continuously public |
| Does it cover full text? | Yes | Yes | No, metadata and abstracts only |
| Does it help if the publisher is gone? | No, nobody is left to restore it | Yes, that is its purpose | Partly; the record survives, the article does not |
Read the bottom row before accepting any publisher's reassurance, ours included. "We take backups" answers a different question.
What continuity Directive Publications content has today
Four things hold for the articles we publish. The Crossref record and the licence survive us outright. The XML and the feed are served from our own site, so they help only while it is up, or where the metadata has already been harvested.
- A registered Crossref DOI. Every published article has one under the prefix 10.52338, so the record does not disappear with our servers.
- JATS XML. Each article is published as a JATS XML record, the standard format for journal articles, carrying the full text where we hold it rather than only a web page. XML is what a receiving repository would need.
- An OAI-PMH feed. OAI-PMH lets any repository or aggregator harvest our metadata automatically. Records also appear in OpenAlex and Google Scholar.
- Open access under a CC BY 4.0 licence by default, with copyright retained by you. Where an article carries CC BY 4.0 and you keep copyright, you need no permission from us to deposit, host or republish your own article in its published form. Our copyright and licensing policy sets out the licence and the copyright position.
These keep the record of your work distributed rather than sitting on one company's disk. They are not a preservation agreement, and we will not call them one.
The gap, stated without euphemism: no named preservation archive
Directive Publications is not currently enrolled in a third-party preservation archive. No external organisation holds a dark copy of our full text under an agreement permitting it to publish that content if we stopped operating. Our preservation policy describes our approach in general terms for that reason, and we will not dress the position up with a logo.
The practical consequence: if we ceased to operate and the domains lapsed, the DOIs, the Crossref records and the harvested metadata would persist, so your citation would remain verifiable against the Crossref record. The article pages and PDFs would not be reachable, and DOI links would land on nothing until the records were redirected.
A three-step continuity plan you control
The three steps below take an afternoon, use routes that are normally free to the author, and work whatever happens to a publisher. Do them for every paper you publish, anywhere.
| Step | What you do | What it protects against |
|---|---|---|
| 1. Repository deposit | Deposit the article in your institutional or subject repository, with the DOI in the metadata | The publisher's website disappearing; a paywall later appearing over the version of record |
| 2. Data and code deposit | Deposit the underlying data, analysis scripts and materials in a repository that issues its own DOI | Loss of the evidence base; an unverifiable paper; a dead laptop or an expired lab drive |
| 3. Personal archive | Keep one offline folder per paper with the final PDF, the source files, the DOI and the correspondence | Publisher and repository failing at once; needing the accepted version at short notice |
Step 1: deposit the article in a repository, not only on your own page
Ask your library for the deposit route into your institutional repository; with no institution, use a subject repository, and OpenDOAR lists them by discipline. Where an article carries our default CC BY 4.0 licence and you hold copyright, you may deposit the published version of record itself, immediately, with no embargo and no permission request; check the licence printed on the article. Put the DOI in the repository metadata, tying your copy to the registered record.
Step 2: deposit data and code where they get their own DOI
An article without its data is a claim without evidence. Deposit datasets, analysis scripts, questionnaires and protocols in a repository that mints a DOI; re3data is the registry to search. A DOI on the data means it can be cited on its own and survives independently of the journal. For clinical work, deposit what your ethics approval and consent allow, and state the access conditions.
Step 3: keep a personal archive that outlives your institutional email
Keep one folder per paper in two places, one of them offline:
- The published PDF, downloaded on the day of publication
- The accepted manuscript as a separate file, where the published version is not permitted
- The editable sources: manuscript document, figure originals at full resolution, tables, supplementary files
- A plain text file with the full citation, the DOI, the licence and the publication date
- The ethics approval reference, where consent forms are held, and any trial registration number
- The submission and decision correspondence, including reviewer reports and your responses
Name each folder so it sorts and searches: 2026-JournalShort-FirstAuthor-ShortTitle, and keep it off the institutional account you will one day lose. You can also ask the Internet Archive's Wayback Machine to capture your article page: a public snapshot, not a preservation agreement. Agree early who keeps this folder; the corresponding author's responsibilities are the obvious place to assign it.
Five questions to ask any publisher about long-term access
| Ask | What a good answer sounds like |
|---|---|
| Are you enrolled in a third-party preservation archive, and which one? | A named archive. "We back up daily" is not an answer. Ours: no, not currently |
| Who registers your DOIs? | A registration agency such as Crossref or DataCite, which holds the metadata independently |
| What licence applies, and who holds copyright? | CC BY, with copyright retained by the author. The licence and the copyright are separate points, so ask about both |
| Can your metadata be harvested through OAI-PMH? | Yes, with a working endpoint, so the record is already copied outside the publisher |
| Is the full text available as XML? | As JATS XML, the format a receiving archive expects. Ours: a JATS record for every article, carrying the full text where we hold it |
A publisher that answers all five plainly, including the uncomfortable one, is showing you how it behaves when something goes wrong. Our position is set out on the preservation policy and copyright pages, and this post will be updated if that position changes. For background, read digital preservation and what happens to your article in 50 years, preprint, accepted manuscript and version of record explained and what a DOI is and what it does.