The Boston Congress of Public Health Review (BCPHR), the official academic journal of the Boston Congress of Public Health (BCPH), is committed to the permanent availability and preservation of the scholarship it publishes. This policy describes how BCPHR content is preserved, identified, and made continuously accessible, and the rights authors and institutions have to archive published work. Our practices follow the recommendations of the Committee on Publication Ethics (COPE), the International Committee of Medical Journal Editors (ICMJE), and Crossref.

Long-Term Digital Preservation

BCPHR maintains a digital preservation strategy designed to ensure that published content remains accessible even if the journal ceases to publish or a catastrophic technical event occurs. The full scholarly record — including content published under the journal's prior banners, Harvard Public Health Review (2013–2021) and HPHR Journal (2021–2024) — is included in this strategy.

• Distributed preservation. The version of record is preserved in independent, geographically distributed dark and light archives (such as Portico, CLOCKSS, and/or the LOCKSS network). These services release preserved content to the scholarly community in defined "trigger events," such as a journal ceasing operations.
• Repository deposit. Where eligibility criteria are met, BCPHR content is deposited in disciplinary repositories such as PubMed Central, ensuring an additional independent point of access.
• Local backups. BCPHR maintains routine, redundant backups of all published content, metadata, and supplementary files.

Persistent Identifiers

Every BCPHR article is assigned a Digital Object Identifier (DOI) registered with Crossref under the journal prefix 10.54111/. DOIs provide a stable, permanent link to each article regardless of changes to website structure or hosting. All DOIs assigned under Harvard Public Health Review, HPHR, and BCPHR remain valid in perpetuity and continue to resolve to the version of record.

Continuity of Access & Web Addresses

BCPHR is committed to link permanence. All current and legacy web addresses — BCPHR.org, HPHR.org, and HarvardPublicHealthReview.org — continue to resolve. Articles published before October 2024 retain their original publication signature under HPHR or Harvard Public Health Review, while all content published in October 2024 and beyond appears under BCPHR. No article's citation, DOI, or access point is invalidated by the journal's rebranding.

Author Self-Archiving (Green Open Access)

BCPHR is a fully open-access journal, and articles are published under a Creative Commons Attribution (CC BY) license. Because authors retain copyright, they are free to archive and disseminate their work without embargo. Specifically, authors may:

• Deposit the published version of record (the final, typeset PDF) in personal websites, institutional repositories, subject repositories, and scholarly networking sites immediately upon publication;
• Include the article in theses, dissertations, grant reports, and teaching materials; and
• Share the article through preprint servers and professional profiles.

In all cases, the original publication in BCPHR should be cited and the DOI included, and the CC BY license terms should be preserved so that reuse rights travel with the work.

Corrections, Retractions & the Permanent Record

Consistent with COPE guidance, BCPHR treats the published article as a permanent and version-stable part of the scholarly record. Corrections, expressions of concern, and retractions are issued as separate, linked, and citable notices rather than by silently altering or removing the original article. Retracted articles remain available, clearly watermarked and linked to the retraction notice, so that the integrity and traceability of the literature are maintained.

Metadata

BCPHR deposits complete bibliographic and funding metadata with Crossref and makes it openly available for indexing, discovery, and preservation services. Open metadata supports long-term findability and allows third-party archives and aggregators to maintain accurate records of the journal's output.

This policy reflects preservation and access practices consistent with leading peer-reviewed journals and the standards of COPE, ICMJE, and Crossref. Questions regarding archiving or preservation may be directed to the BCPHR editorial office.