[seqfan] Re: article in Nature about link rot

[israel at math.ubc.ca]

Many of these 103,000 are links to published papers: if they are in 
the DOI system or arXiv, the links should be stable.  It's mainly the 
links to personal web-pages that are dicey.

On a somewhat related subject: many pages include something like "see the 
link", often in Comments or Examples, sometimes in Name. Perhaps when this 
was written there was only one link on that page. But later editing adds 
more links, and it's no longer obvious which link is referred to. See e.g. 
A085260: there are three links besides the b-file and an Index page, and 
it's not at all obvious which has an explanation of "twin".

It would be nice, I guess, if our pages could include internal hyperlinks, 
but in their absence it would be good to write not just "the link" but "the 
xxxx link" where xxxx is the author or some other unique identifier for the 
link in question. Something to keep in mind when editing pages.

Cheers,
Robert

On Jul 8 2015, Neil Sloane wrote:

>Dear Seq Fans,
>
>the May7 2015 issue of Nature
>has an article about Link Rot (which
>of course is a major problem for us, see below), and ways that people are
>trying to solver it
>
>Here are some key parags from the article:
>
>online archiving services, such as the Internet Archive, make it possible
>for researchers to store permanent copies of a web page as they see it when
>preparing their manuscripts - a practice Van de Sompel recommends. He urges
>researchers to include their cached link and its creation date in their
>manuscripts (or for publishers to take a snapshot of referenced material
>when articles are submitted). The Harvard Law School Library in Cambridge,
>Massachusetts, has developed a web-archiving service called Perma.cc (
>https://perma.cc): enter a hyperlink here and the site spits back a new
>hyperlink for a page that contains links to both the original web source
>and an archived version.
>
>Van de Sompel and others have in the past few weeks rolled out a
>complementary approach. It relies on a service that Van de Sompel has
>co-developed called Memento, which he dubs "time travel for the web". The
>Memento infrastructure provides a single interface for myriad online
>archives, allowing users access to all of the saved versions of a given web
>page. This infrastructure could potentially allow access to web-at-large
>links in any scholarly article, even if the linked sites go down.
>Publishers would have to incorporate a small piece of extra computer code
>in their articles, and the standard single weblinks would have to be
>replaced with three pieces of information - the live link, a cached link
>and its creation date - all wrapped in Van de Sompel's proposed
>machine-readable tags.
>
>I didn't really understand the article - can we use any of these ideas?
>
>The OEIS has about 220,000 links, of which 82,000 are to b-files, 33,000
>are links to the Index to the OEIS, and the remaining 103,000 are links to
>the web.  Presumably somewhere between 25% and 40% of these
>links are broken
>
>
>Best regards
>Neil
>
>Neil J. A. Sloane, President, OEIS Foundation.
>11 South Adelaide Avenue, Highland Park, NJ 08904, USA.
>Also Visiting Scientist, Math. Dept., Rutgers University, Piscataway, NJ.
>Phone: 732 828 6098; home page: http://NeilSloane.com
>Email: njasloane at gmail.com
>
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