CrimConsortium (CrimRxiv): Permanent Preservation for Open-Access Scholarship

Overview

CrimConsortium partnered with Permanent Data Solutions (PDS) to migrate CrimRxiv—its open-access criminology repository—to permanent decentralized infrastructure built on ar.io and Arweave. This migration ensures that over 3,700 scholarly publications remain permanently accessible, verifiable, and independent of any single platform or vendor.

With its previous hosting platform (PubPub) scheduled to sunset at the end of 2026, CrimConsortium faced an urgent need for a preservation solution that could guarantee long-term access while maintaining the discoverability and citation integrity that researchers depend on. The result is a fully functional archive at https://crimrxiv-demo.ar.io that demonstrates OAIS-aligned digital preservation on decentralized infrastructure.

The Challenge

Migrating an active scholarly repository to permanent storage introduced several critical requirements:

• Platform Independence: The existing host (PubPub) is sunsetting, requiring migration to infrastructure that eliminates future platform dependencies.
• Preservation Standards: The solution must align with OAIS (Open Archival Information System) standards for provenance, fixity, and long-term access.
• Citation Integrity: Existing DOIs and scholarly references must remain valid and resolvable alongside new permanent identifiers.
• Discoverability: Researchers must be able to search, browse, and access the full corpus without degraded functionality.
• Verifiability: Each publication must be independently verifiable for authenticity and integrity without relying on a central authority.
• Open Access Compliance: All content is published under Creative Commons licenses, requiring a solution that preserves and surfaces licensing information permanently.
• Cost Predictability: Traditional cloud storage requires ongoing subscription fees with no guarantee of perpetual access.

The Solution

PDS worked with CrimConsortium to build a permanent, self-contained archive that operates entirely on decentralized infrastructure while providing a familiar research portal experience.

Key elements included:

• Single Page Application (SPA) stored entirely on Arweave, accessible via ArNS naming
• Client-side database queries using DuckDB-WASM against Parquet-formatted metadata
• Full-text search across 3,700+ publications running entirely in the browser
• Dual identifier system linking DOIs to Arweave transaction IDs (TXIDs)
• Per-article manifest files preserving content, metadata, and licensing on-chain
• Multi-gateway access ensuring availability across 600+ ar.io gateways
• Hash-based routing for stable URLs without server-side dependencies

Implementation Highlights

• Data Pipeline Architecture: A three-stage pipeline extracts content from PubPub via SDK, stores it in SQLite as the source of truth, then exports to Parquet format optimized for browser-based queries.
• Self-Contained Deployment: The entire application, including CSS and JavaScript, is inlined into a single HTML artifact. No external CDNs, fonts, or runtime dependencies.
• Decentralized Search: DuckDB-WASM enables sub-500ms full-text search across the entire corpus without any backend infrastructure.
• Verifiable Provenance: Each article page displays both its DOI and TXID. Selecting the TXID reveals block height, timestamp, submitter identity, content hash, and permanent license tag.
• ArNS Integration: The repository is addressable via human-readable ArNS names, with prepaid storage eliminating ongoing hosting costs.
• Creative Commons Preservation: License information (e.g., CC-BY-4.0) is permanently bound to each record as an on-chain tag.

Results

• Complete migration of 3,700+ criminology publications to permanent storage
• Fully functional research portal with search, browse, and article detail views
• Zero ongoing hosting costs after initial upload
• Verifiable preservation proof for every publication (TXID + hash + timestamp)
• Platform-independent access across 600+ ar.io gateways worldwide
• OAIS-aligned preservation demonstrating provenance, fixity, and access rights
• Reusable architecture serving as a template for other repository migrations

Why It Matters

The CrimRxiv pilot validates decentralized permanence as a practical path to meeting established archival standards. It demonstrates that scholarly repositories can achieve:

• Long-term preservation without subscription fees or platform lock-in
• Verifiable integrity where any observer can confirm authenticity
• Continued discoverability through familiar DOIs linked to permanent identifiers
• Open reuse enabling others to index, mirror, analyze, or build upon the archive

CrimConsortium becomes the first institutional anchor for the Continuum Framework, proving that decentralized infrastructure can meet the trust, provenance, and access requirements of serious digital stewardship.

Takeaway

CrimConsortium chose permanent storage to ensure open-access criminology research remains accessible, verifiable, and independent—forever.

Permanent preservation is no longer aspirational.
It is operational infrastructure for scholarship.