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How long each kind of data lives on the platform, category by category - and why the published record never expires.
Last updated: 23 August 2026
Different kinds of data deserve different lifetimes. This policy states, category by category, how long the platform keeps data and why - and it reflects what the software actually enforces, not just what a page promises.
Published articles, proceedings, posted preprints, their metadata, DOIs, version histories, and any withdrawal or removal notices are retained permanently. This is the point of a publishing platform: the record that others cite must not disappear. Even a withdrawn work keeps its page, marked and dated, and a legally removed work keeps a minimal record so its identifier still resolves. The editorial record behind a published work (reviews, decisions) is retained with it.
A submission that was never published belongs to its author's workflow, not to the record. A preprint still in screening can be deleted outright by its author, files included. Rejected and withdrawn-before-publication manuscripts remain visible to their author and venue while the account and venue are active, and are removed when the venue's data is deleted at the end of its subscription or on a verified request.
Invoices, receipts, and payment records are kept for the period tax law requires of a registered Pakistani business, and are then eligible for deletion. These records cannot be deleted earlier, even on request - the law, not the platform, sets this clock.
Account data is kept while the account is active. When an account is closed or its deletion is requested, personal data is deleted or anonymized - with one principled exception: authorship of anything published stays on the published record, because scholarly attribution is part of the permanent record itself (section 1).
Operational logs clean themselves up on a schedule enforced by the platform: sign-in sessions and login-attempt records are kept for around 90 days; security audit trails, activity logs, and the email delivery log for up to two years; password-reset and short-lived technical tokens for days, not months. These windows exist for security investigation and support, and expire automatically.
The demo site is a sandbox: its data is reset nightly and nothing entered there is retained.
To exercise a data right, request deletion, or ask how a specific record is treated: info@techfist.org. Where a venue on AMS is run by an independent organizer, requests about that venue's manuscripts go to its organizer as Data Controller (see the Data Processing Agreement) - we assist them in answering.