How Directive Publications works to keep its published research findable, citable, and accessible over the long term — described honestly, without guarantees.
Directive Publications is committed to the long-term availability and integrity of the scholarly record we publish. As an international open-access publisher launched in 2026, with a growing portfolio of peer-reviewed journals across medicine, the life sciences, and public health, we recognise that publishing research carries a lasting responsibility: readers, authors, libraries, and future scholars must be able to find, cite, and trust the work over time.
This policy describes, plainly and honestly, the concrete measures we take today to support durability, and the formal arrangements we are actively developing as the publisher matures. We favour clear, verifiable commitments over promises we cannot keep. No publisher can guarantee that any digital object will exist unchanged forever; what we can do — and describe here — is build our operations on open, standards-based scholarly infrastructure that maximises long-term access and makes independent preservation by others possible.
This policy applies to the version of record — the published article in PDF, HTML, and structured JATS XML form — together with its bibliographic and descriptive metadata, for all articles published across our peer-reviewed journals. Because all of our content is Open Access under a Creative Commons Attribution licence, the measures below apply uniformly to every published work.
Directive Publications is a Crossref member. Every published article receives a Crossref-registered Digital Object Identifier (DOI) under our prefix 10.52338. The DOI is the stable, citable link for the article: it is the identifier authors should cite and readers should bookmark, in preference to any raw website address.
A DOI continues to resolve to the article even if our website's URL structure later changes — when a page moves, we update the Crossref record so the DOI points to the article's current location. This keeps the citation reliably locatable over the long term. To be precise about what this achieves: a DOI persists the identifier and the citable link — it is not, in itself, a copy of the file or a preservation of the underlying bytes. DOI resolution and content durability are complementary but distinct; the sections that follow describe how we address the content itself.
We expose our content metadata openly and in machine-readable, standard formats so that it can be discovered and captured by third parties without needing our involvement:
Open metadata is a cornerstone of preservation because it makes our content findable by the systems that can preserve, index, or replicate it. Combined with our open licensing (below), it allows the wider community to act independently of the publisher.
All articles are published Open Access under the Creative Commons Attribution 4.0 International (CC BY 4.0) licence, and authors retain copyright (see our Copyright & Licensing policy). Crucially for durability, CC BY 4.0 legally permits any third party — including libraries and web-archiving initiatives — to copy, redistribute, and preserve the work, provided the original authors are credited.
This means preservation of our content is not solely dependent on Directive Publications. For example, an open web-archiving service such as the Internet Archive is able to capture and retain open, DOI-identified articles precisely because CC BY licensing and open metadata permit it. We name the Internet Archive here only as an illustration of the kind of independent service that can archive this content — it is not a formal partner of, or a preservation arrangement held by, Directive Publications.
As an operational-resilience measure, we take regular, secure backups of the full site and the database to a separate off-site location. These backups support content integrity, disaster recovery, and business continuity: if a technical failure occurs, we are able to restore the published record and its metadata.
We describe these backups qualitatively and deliberately do not overstate them. Off-site backups are an internal continuity and recovery mechanism — they are not a certified external dark archive, a distributed preservation network, or an equivalent of a formal digital-archiving service. They complement, but do not replace, the community preservation pathways and the formal arrangement described below.
Preservation is meaningful only if the record readers retrieve is the correct, definitive one. We handle post-publication changes transparently in line with our Corrections & Retractions and Research Integrity policies:
We publish in widely supported, open formats — PDF, HTML, and structured JATS XML — chosen to aid long-term readability, interoperability, and future migration. Open, non-proprietary formats reduce the risk that content becomes unreadable as technology evolves, and JATS in particular provides a structured, standards-based representation that other systems can reliably ingest.
We are actively pursuing a formal external digital-archiving arrangement as the publisher matures. This is a clear commitment and part of our roadmap, not an accomplished fact: we do not at present participate in any external preservation or dark-archive network. In the interim, long-term access is supported through the concrete measures set out above — persistent Crossref DOIs, open harvestable metadata, CC BY licensing that enables third-party preservation, secure off-site backups, and durable open formats. As our arrangements advance, we will update this policy to describe them accurately.
Our approach follows the FAIR guidance for research outputs, mapped to specific, real practices:
Our editorial and integrity policies are aligned with the COPE Core Practices and follow the ICMJE Recommendations. We build on open scholarly infrastructure — Crossref, OAI-PMH, JATS, and ORCID — that the community relies on for discovery and preservation. (Alignment with these bodies and principles reflects the standards we follow; it does not imply membership of, or certification by, any of them.) For related context, see our Editorial Policies and Publication Ethics.
Should a journal ever cease publication, we will seek to keep its published record accessible and its DOIs resolvable, so that existing citations continue to work. Because our content is openly licensed under CC BY 4.0 and its metadata is openly harvestable, the wider community — including libraries and web-archiving services — is also legally and technically able to preserve it independently. This is a good-faith commitment consistent with community good practice for continuing resources; it is not a guarantee of permanence.
This policy sits alongside our Open Access, Corrections & Retractions, and Research Integrity policies. Authors preparing a submission may also find our Author Guidelines and Data Availability policy useful, or can proceed directly to submit a manuscript.
Questions about preservation and archiving can be directed to [email protected], or by post to Directive Publications, 30 N Gould St, Sheridan, WY 82801, USA. This policy is reviewed periodically and will be updated as our preservation arrangements evolve.