When Access Fails, Archives Disappear

In practice, many of the most damaging preservation failures today have little to do with corruption or deletion. The data still exists but what fails is access.

Platforms shut down. Funding runs out. Contracts expire. Infrastructure changes. Links break. Identifiers stop resolving. Communities discover, often too late, that material they assumed was stable is no longer reachable.

This is not a hypothetical risk either. It is a pattern that libraries, archives, and research communities are increasingly familiar with.

Access loss is a systems problem

Most preservation teams already understand that long-term access cannot depend on any single vendor, platform, or organization. This is why frameworks like the Open Archival Information System (OAIS) exist in the first place. OAIS is a responsibility model.

It defines what an archive must be able to do over time:

• Maintain access independent of changing systems
• Preserve authenticity and provenance
• Ensure identifiers continue to resolve
• Survive organizational and technological change

The challenge many institutions face today is a mismatch between those standards and the infrastructure most digital content relies on.

Modern publishing platforms, repositories, and hosting services are usually subscription-based, centrally operated, and tightly coupled to the continued existence of the organization running them. They work well until they don’t. When they sunset, merge, defund, or change direction, access becomes fragile.

The result is a quiet and serious failure mode: intact records that are no longer reachable.

A recent example: CrimRxiv

CrimRxiv Consortium is an open criminology and criminal justice preprint repository, built to support a global research community. Like many scholarly platforms, it has relied on a hosted publishing service, PubPub.

Recently, the PubPub team has done important work to extend their operational runway by several years. This is good news, and it reflects the care and effort of the people maintaining that platform. For more details, see the Knowledge Futures January 2026 update.

At the same time, the situation underscores a broader structural reality that many archives face. Even well-run, mission-driven platforms remain tied to funding cycles, organizational continuity, and long-term resourcing decisions that are often outside the control of the communities that depend on them.

For repositories like CrimRxiv, the core risk has never been imminent failure. It is dependency. Without deliberate action, long-term access remains coupled to the continued viability of a specific platform, rather than guaranteed independently of it.

This is a textbook example of access risk. It is exactly the kind of scenario OAIS is meant to address.

Introducing Continuum

As part of our recent work, we introduced Continuum, an initiative focused on aligning permanent, decentralized internet infrastructure with established digital preservation standards.

Continuum does not propose a new standard or replace OAIS. Instead, it serves as a mapping framework, translating decentralized permanent storage protocols into the language, concepts, and responsibilities that preservation professionals already use.

The goal is to make it easier for institutions like archives, libraries, and research communities to evaluate permanent infrastructure using familiar criteria.

At a high level, Continuum maps:

• OAIS responsibilities to decentralized storage and access primitives
• Preservation concepts like fixity, provenance, and authenticity to cryptographic guarantees
• Long-term access requirements to infrastructure designed to outlive platforms and providers

This work starts from a recognition that preservation is about continuity, responsibility, and trust.

Why permanent access matters

Technologies like Arweave have already demonstrated that permanent storage, funded upfront and designed to persist for centuries, is possible in practice. With nearly eight years of real-world durability, it has become a strong candidate for what a true permanent digital library could rest on.

What has historically been missing is the access layer: reliable, verifiable, standards-aware access that institutions can reason about, depend on, and explain to their stakeholders.

With the maturity of ar.io, that full stack now exists. Enduring storage is paired with resilient, verifiable access through a global network of independent gateways. Identifiers resolve independently of any single operator and content remains reachable even if platforms, publishers, or institutions change.

Continuum exists to help institutions understand what that means in preservation terms instead of protocol terms.

The CrimRxiv Continuum pilot

Working with Professor Scott Jacques of Georgia State University and the Criminology Consortium, we documented the Continuum framework and applied it to a real preservation challenge: ensuring the long-term accessibility of the CrimRxiv archive.

The pilot preserves the full repository with:

• Permanent, resolvable identifiers
• Verifiable provenance and authenticity
• Open access, without subscriptions or paywalls
• Resilient access independent of the original publishing platform

The intent was not to present this as a final answer, but as a concrete example of how OAIS-aligned thinking can be applied to new infrastructure models.

Learn more about the pilot in our CrimRxiv case study.

A broader implication for digital preservation

What CrimRxiv highlights is a structural problem.

As more of our scholarly, cultural, and public records depend on platforms with finite lifespans, preservation strategies must account explicitly for access independence. Backups, migrations, and contracts are not enough.

Access has to be designed to outlive systems.

Continuum is one attempt to make that design legible, auditable, and compatible with the standards preservation professionals already rely on.

An invitation to institutions

This work is still early and it deserves careful scrutiny. Preservation is a domain where confidence must be earned slowly.

We are inviting feedback from researchers, archivists, librarians, and digital preservation officers on:

• The Continuum framework itself
• Its alignment with OAIS responsibilities
• Where the mapping is clear, and where it needs refinement
• How permanent infrastructure could responsibly complement existing preservation workflows

If you are a steward of an archive facing platform risk, funding uncertainty, or long-term access challenges, we are open to conversation.

Preservation has never been just about keeping data but about ensuring access, long after the systems that created it are gone.