Digital Archiving and Preservation Policy

Digital Archiving and Preservation Policy

Afaq Research Horizons is committed to ensuring the long-term preservation, integrity, and perpetual accessibility of all published scholarly content in compliance with international open-access standards.

1. Long-Term Digital Preservation

The journal guarantees the protection of published articles from loss, digital obsolescence, or technical disruptions. All published volumes, full-text articles (PDF), and their associated metadata are deposited in standardized, preservation-ready formats to ensure continuous, unrestricted retrieval over time.

2. Preservation Systems and Networks

  • LOCKSS System: The journal supports the distributed archiving network LOCKSS (Lots of Copies Keep Stuff Safe), allowing participating academic libraries to create permanent, decentralized archives for preservation and restoration purposes.
  • PKP Preservation Network (PKP PN): Published issues are securely archived within the Public Knowledge Project Preservation Network, ensuring long-term open-access availability even in the event of an unforeseen cessation of the journal’s primary platform.
  • National Legal Deposit: All published issues comply with official legal deposit regulations and are registered with the National Library of the Kingdom of Morocco (Bibliothèque Nationale du Royaume du Maroc - BNRM).

3. Author Self-Archiving (Green Open Access)

Authors are permitted and encouraged to deposit the final published version (Publisher's PDF) of their work in institutional or non-commercial open repositories (e.g., Zenodo, institutional repositories), provided that Afaq Research Horizons is acknowledged as the original source of publication with proper citation and link/DOI to the original article.

LOCKSS Harvesting and Verification Gateway

Preservation networks, harvesters, and indexing evaluation committees can inspect the journal's official LOCKSS manifest, archival units, and licensing metadata via the direct gateway link:

 https://afaqresearch.com/index.php/arh/en/gateway/lockss