Preservation policy

Last updated 2026-05-18. Plain English.

What we commit to

OpenXiv is a young single-operator repository (David Alfyorov, Vilnius, LT). We are honest about that: we cannot promise a multi-decade institutional commitment the way arXiv or Zenodo can. What we do commit to:

• DOI persistence through a registration agency (Crossref or a sponsor membership). DOIs remain resolvable even if the OpenXiv front-end is unavailable.
• Replicated storage during normal operation (see "Storage" below).
• A documented, advance-noticed handoff plan if we ever shut down (see "If we shut down" below).

Identifiers (DOIs)

DOIs are minted through Crossref under the OpenXiv member prefix. The DOI is opaque (10.{prefix}/openxiv.{openxiv_id}) and immutable: it survives renaming, host migration, and registrar changes. DOIs are transferable — if OpenXiv winds down, the prefix record can be reassigned to whichever archive takes custody.

Until Crossref membership credentials are provisioned, papers publish with their OpenXiv id (e.g. openxiv:cs.AI.2026.00001) as the canonical reference. The OpenXiv id is itself persistent — the canonical URL https://openxiv.net/abs/{id} resolves forever, with or without a DOI.

Storage

Primary storage runs on MinIO inside the production stack (currently hosted in the EU, Contabo VPS 20). The dataset comprises the source archive, the compiled PDF, the LaTeXML HTML, the cover page, the figure crops, and the per-version content hash.

Backups: daily snapshots are taken of the Postgres database and the MinIO bucket; we retain 30 days of rolling snapshots and cut a full quarterly archive into cold storage on a separate provider.

Federation

Every published paper exists as an AT-proto record in the author's Personal Data Server — typically Bluesky's, or a self-hosted PDS. If OpenXiv's App View goes offline, the authoritative records still live in those PDSes and can be re-indexed by any AT-proto-aware view. This is the most durable preservation layer we have today, because it does not depend on OpenXiv staying alive.

If we shut down

We commit to a 6-month shutdown notice posted prominently on every abstract page, the home page, and the OAI-PMH feed. Within that window we will:

• Transfer the full content + metadata corpus to Zenodo under the same OpenXiv ids; the Zenodo URLs become the long-term resolution target.
• Transfer the Crossref DOI prefix records to point to the Zenodo locations.
• Publish a final crawl-friendly archive (Atom + sitemap) and submit it to the Internet Archive.

No content is deleted on shutdown; everything that was open stays open. The handoff is the inverse of the launch: ids stay stable, content stays addressable, the host changes.

Roadmap

Items not yet shipped but on the preservation roadmap:

• Software Heritage deposit for any code archives bundled with submissions.
• Internet Archive Wayback-Machine sitemap submission for every published abstract page.
• CLOCKKS-style multi-host replication once the corpus is large enough to warrant the operational overhead.

Related: Metadata policy · Content policy · All policies.