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Public Comment

on 2006-07-17 by proberts

Archives web pages for bibliographic citation.

on 2006-09-27 by marlene

outil d'archivage de liens

Public Sticky notes

The Problem

Authors increasingly cite webpages and other digital objects on the Internet, which can "disappear" overnight. In one study published in the journal Science, 13% of Internet references in scholarly articles were inactive after only 27 months. Another problem is that cited webpages may change, so that readers see something different than what the citing author saw. The problem of unstable webcitations and the lack of routine digital preservation of cited digital objects has been referred to as an issue "calling for an immediate response" by publishers and authors [1].

An increasing number of editors and publishers ask that authors, when they cite a webpage, make a local copy of the cited webpage/webmaterial, and archive the cited URL in a system like WebCite®, to enable readers permanent access to the cited material.

Highlighted by marbux

What is WebCite®?

WebCite®, a member of the International Internet Preservation Consortium, is an on-demand archiving system for webreferences (cited webpages and websites, or other kinds of Internet-accessible digital objects), which can be used by authors, editors, and publishers of scholarly papers and books, to ensure that cited webmaterial will remain available to readers in the future. If cited webreferences in journal articles, books etc. are not archived, future readers may encounter a "404 File Not Found" error when clicking on a cited URL. Try it! Archive a URL here. It's free and takes only 30 seconds.

A WebCite®-enhanced reference is a reference which contains - in addition to the original live URL (which can and probably will disappear in the future, or its content may change) - a link to an archived copy of the material, exactly as the citing author saw it when he accessed the cited material.

Highlighted by marbux

WebCite®, a member of the International Internet Preservation Consortium, is an on-demand archiving system for webreferences (cited webpages and websites, or other kinds of Internet-accessible digital objects), which can be used by authors, editors, and publishers of scholarly papers and books, to ensure that cited webmaterial will remain available to readers in the future.

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A WebCite®-enhanced reference is a reference which contains - in addition to the original live URL (which can and probably will disappear in the future, or its content may change) - a link to an archived copy of the material, exactly as the citing author saw it when he accessed the cited material.

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Alternatively, the cited URL and the cited date can be part of a single WebCite® URL (the transparent format), making it obsolete to spell out the original URL. The drawback is that the WebCite® URL can become pretty long:

Plunkett, John. "Sorrell accuses Murdoch of panic buying", The Guardian, October 27, 2005, archived URL: http://www.webcitation.org/query?url=media.guardian.co.uk/site/story/0,14173,1601858,00.html&date=2006-12-04

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Most style guides currently give little or no guidance on how to cite URLs and their archived version, but most editors will accept something along the lines of citing the original URL together with the archived URL in a submitted manuscript

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Another form of a WebCite® link contains the cited URL and the DOI (Digital Object Identifier) of the citing document (refdoi):

IMEX. http://www.webcitation.org/query.php?url=http://imex.sourceforge.net&refdoi=10.1186/jbiol36

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WebCite® is an entirely free service for authors who want to cite webmaterial, regardless of what publication they are writing for

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Either manually initiate the archiving of a single cited webpage (by using either the WebCite bookmarklet or the archive page)

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Another example is the Journal of Medical Internet Research - almost all articles in this Journal cite URLs, and since 2005 all are archived. See http://www.jmir.org/2005/5/e60#ref9 for an example.

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