selfarchive

Self-archive, sometimes written as selfarchive, is a term used to describe practices and technologies that give individuals or organizations the ability to store and preserve copies of their own digital content under their own control, rather than relying exclusively on external services or platforms.

In academia, self-archiving refers to authors depositing copies of their scholarly works in openly accessible repositories or personal collections. This may include preprints, postprints, accepted manuscripts, datasets, code, and supplementary material. Self-archiving is often motivated by open access goals, rights to distribute, or the desire to ensure long-term availability even if a publisher’s site changes or becomes unavailable. In web contexts, self-archiving can also involve capturing and preserving copies of web pages for personal or scholarly purposes.

Practices commonly involve local backups, self-hosted repositories, or personal cloud storage, complemented by metadata and versioning to track revisions. Users may employ standardized formats (such as PDFs or plain text), basic metadata, and periodic integrity checks to guard against data decay. Some workflows include periodic exports to archival formats and strategies to mitigate obsolescence of software or file types.

Benefits of self-archiving include greater control over copies, increased resilience against service outages or platform shutdowns, and improved reproducibility and citation persistence. Challenges encompass legal restrictions on distributing certain materials, the ongoing effort required to maintain archives, costs and storage needs, and risks related to data corruption or format obsolescence without proper preservation practices.

The concept intersects with digital preservation, personal data management, and open access policy. It relies on repositories, metadata and archival-format standards, and user education to maintain discoverability, integrity, and long-term access.