BIIACS social-sciences repository went dark December 2023 despite "perpetuity" pledge

The Banco de Información para la Investigación Aplicada en Ciencias Sociales — a social sciences repository hosted by the Centro de Investigación y Docencia Económicas in Mexico City across political science, economics, jurisprudence, and geography — obtained Data Seal of Approval certification in 2013 with an explicit pledge of "perpetuity of the data." It went dark on December 15, 2023. Its persistent identifiers no longer resolve, and no successor repository has been named (S-0037).

The case is the strongest counterexample to the claim that formal certification is a reliable indicator of long-term preservation. Federal funding (the host institution is federally funded), national-service designation, and Data Seal of Approval certification with an express durability pledge each proved insufficient to prevent closure under organizational conditions that produced the aggregate statistic in E-0006.

The pledge of "perpetuity" was operationally meaningless because the architecture supplying it was Tier 1: a single institutional repository at a single host. C-0011's Claim — Tier 1 is one organizational decision away from the same outcome as Tier 0 — is realized in this case, on a 10-year timeline, despite the strongest formal preservation commitments available in the certification regime.

The architectural fix is not a stronger pledge; it is preservation that does not depend on a pledge.