Archiving Policy
INDUSTRICS
Archiving Policy
An open access journal promises permanence, not just availability. Availability is what the journal's website provides today; preservation is what guarantees the same articles remain readable decades from now, whatever happens to the journal, its platform or its publisher. INDUSTRICS treats the two separately and commits to both.
The commitment matters more here than the word "archiving" suggests. An article reporting a fatigue limit, a corrosion rate, a control strategy or a failure mode is consulted long after it is published: by an engineer specifying a component, by a standards committee revising a clause, by an investigator reconstructing why something failed. Such a reader needs the article as published, with any corrections attached to it — not a broken link and a recollection of what it said.
Long-term digital preservation
All published content is deposited, at the time of publication, in Portico, the digital preservation service operated by the not-for-profit organisation ITHAKA. Portico is a certified trustworthy repository that holds content in replicated form across geographically separate sites, migrates it to new formats as technology changes, and operates independently of the journal and its platform. It is a dark archive: it does not serve content while the journal operates. If a trigger event occurs — the journal ceases publication, its content is no longer offered, or its platform fails permanently — Portico opens the preserved articles to readers under the same Creative Commons licence that governed them at publication. Access to the record therefore survives the journal itself, and no reader, library or author needs to act for that to happen.
What is preserved
- The version of record of every article, in both its archival XML and typeset PDF forms, with all figures, tables and plates.
- Supplementary files published with the article.
- Complete bibliographic metadata, including licence, funding and competing-interest information.
- Correction, expression of concern and retraction notices, preserved with the same permanence as the articles they amend and linked to them, so that the history of a result travels with the result. An engineer who retrieves an article from an archive twenty years from now must be able to see that it was corrected, and how.
- Submitted versions, review reports and editorial correspondence are internal records, retained under the journal's confidentiality rules; they are not part of the public archive.
Identifiers and citability
Every article receives a Crossref DOI at publication, with metadata deposited the same day. The DOI, not the URL, is the article's permanent address: if the journal's platform or domain changes, DOI resolution is updated so existing citations continue to work. Correction and retraction notices receive their own DOIs and are linked to the article in both directions, so a citation retrieved from a database carries its own amendment history rather than depending on a reader thinking to check.
Published articles are never deleted or silently replaced; the correction and retraction instruments described in the publishing ethics policy are the only means by which the record changes, and they operate by addition, not erasure. A retracted article stays online, marked, because withdrawing it would break every citation pointing at it and would hide from a later reader exactly the fact they most need to know.
Self-archiving by authors
| Version | Where it may be deposited | Embargo |
|---|---|---|
| Submitted version (preprint) | Preprint servers, institutional and subject repositories, corporate and personal pages, funder sites | None |
| Accepted manuscript | Same venues | None |
| Published version of record | Same venues, and anywhere the CC BY licence permits, including internal engineering documentation | None |
Deposit is permitted immediately in all cases, with no embargo and no permission needed; the governing terms are those of the journal's open access and copyright policy. The journal asks only that deposited copies link to the version of record by its DOI — that is the copy carrying final corrections, and it is the one a later reader should be led to rather than to a superseded file on a company server.
Data and supporting material
Datasets, models and code underlying an article belong in purpose-built public repositories that issue persistent identifiers, cited in the article rather than buried in supplementary files: repositories provide independent preservation and formats suited to reuse. Where material cannot be released — proprietary process data, a customer dataset, a model under commercial licence — the article states that, on the terms set out in the peer review policy. The journal preserves the citation and its identifier as part of the article, so that even material it cannot host remains traceable to its source.
Formats and review of this policy
Content is archived in open, standard formats — JATS XML for text and metadata, PDF for presentation — chosen because they can be migrated as technology changes; Portico performs such migration as part of its preservation mandate. The journal reviews its preservation arrangements annually and keeps this page current, so that what is claimed here is always what is actually in force.