{ "version": "https://jsonfeed.org/version/1.1", "title": "chem-bla-ics", "description": "Chemblaics (pronounced chem-bla-ics) is the science that uses open science and computers to solve problems in chemistry, biochemistry and related fields.", "home_page_url": "https://chem-bla-ics.linkedchemistry.info/", "feed_url": "https://chem-bla-ics.linkedchemistry.info/2021/08/28/scholarly-journals-should-use-archived.json", "icon": "https://chem-bla-ics.linkedchemistry.info/assets/images/chem-bla-ics_logo.png", "language": "en", "authors": [ { "name": "Egon Willighagen", "url": "https://orcid.org/0000-0001-7542-0286", "_orcid": "0000-0001-7542-0286" } ], "items": [ { "id": "https://doi.org/10.59350/q8zfm-45s98", "url": "https://chem-bla-ics.linkedchemistry.info/2021/08/28/scholarly-journals-should-use-archived.html", "title": "Scholarly journals should use "Archived on" instead of "Accessed on"", "content_html": "

Publishing habits changes very slowly, too slowly. The whole industry is incredibly inert, which can lead to severe frustration\nas it did for me . But sometimes small\nchanges can do so much.

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Linkrot, the phenomenon that URLs are not persistent, has been studied, including in the scholarly settings (see\n1998,\n2000,\n2003,\n2006,\n2008,\n2014,\n2015,\n2000,\n2021,\nand probably many more). Indeed, scholarly publishers started introducing the following: URLs should be accompanied with an\n“accessed on” statement. Indeed, you can find this in many bibliographic formatting standards.

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Indeed, this must change, and we already have a solution since 1996:\nthe Internet Archive (tho the archive goes back much longer). I call all publishers to change\ntheir “Accessed on” to “Archived on”. Two simpel solutions that can compliment each other:

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Authors archive upon submission

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This solution is simply introduced by updating author guidelines. Surely it will take a bit of time for bibliography software\nto be updated, and for the time being we still write “Accessed on” until there is proper support of “Archived on”.

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Journals archive upon acceptance

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This solution looks for all URLs in journal articles and archives them. It doesn’t matter if the author already did this,\nbecause the Internet Archive has no trouble handling this:

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\"\"

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Screenshot of the WaybackMachine showing many captures of the sci.kun.nl domain.
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BTW, projects like Wikipedia have automated the process of\narchiving URLs and I see no reason why publishers could not do this.

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References

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Bugeja, M., & Dimitrova, D. V. (2006). The Half-Life Phenomenon. The Serials Librarian, 49(3), 115–123. https://doi.org/10.1300/j123v49n03_10 CrossRef Scholia
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Klein, M., Van de Sompel, H., Sanderson, R., Shankar, H., Balakireva, L., Zhou, K., & Tobin, R. (2014). Scholarly Context Not Found: One in Five Articles Suffers from Reference Rot. PLoS ONE, 9(12), e115253. https://doi.org/10.1371/journal.pone.0115253 CrossRef Scholia
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Król, K., & Zdonek, D. (2019). Peculiarity of the bit rot and link rot phenomena. Global Knowledge, Memory and Communication, 69(1/2), 20–37. https://doi.org/10.1108/gkmc-06-2019-0067 CrossRef Scholia
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Kumar, D. V., Kumar, B. T. S., & Parameshwarappa, D. R. (2015). URLs Link Rot: Implications for Electronic Publishing. World Digital Libraries - An International Journal, 8(1). https://doi.org/10.18329/09757597/2015/8105 (Original work published as English) CrossRef Scholia
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Lieb, T. (1998). Q.A.: Where Do You Think You’re Going Today? The Journal of Electronic Publishing, 4(2). https://doi.org/10.3998/3336451.0004.210 CrossRef Scholia
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Markwell, J., & Brooks, D. W. (2003). “Link rot” limits the usefulness of web‐based educational materials in biochemistry and molecular biology*. Biochemistry and Molecular Biology Education, 31(1), 69–72. https://doi.org/10.1002/bmb.2003.494031010165 CrossRef Scholia
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Tyler, D. C., & McNeil, B. (2003). Librarians and Link Rot: A Comparative Analysis with Some Methodological Considerations. Portal: Libraries and the Academy, 3(4), 615–632. https://doi.org/10.1353/pla.2003.0098 CrossRef Scholia
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", "summary": "Publishing habits changes very slowly, too slowly. The whole industry is incredibly inert, which can lead to severe frustration as it did for me . But sometimes small changes can do so much.", "image": "https://chem-bla-ics.linkedchemistry.info/assets/images/Screenshot_20210828_102732.png", "date_published": "2021-08-28T00:00:00+00:00", "date_modified": "2026-05-17T00:00:00+00:00", "tags": ["publishing"], "_references": [ { "url": "https://doi.org/10.3998/3336451.0004.210", "doi": "10.3998/3336451.0004.210" } , { "url": "https://doi.org/10.1353/pla.2003.0098", "doi": "10.1353/pla.2003.0098" } , { "url": "https://doi.org/10.1002/bmb.2003.494031010165", "doi": "10.1002/bmb.2003.494031010165" } , { "url": "https://doi.org/10.1300/J123v49n03_10", "doi": "10.1300/J123v49n03_10" } , { "url": "https://doi.org/10.1371/journal.pone.0115253", "doi": "10.1371/journal.pone.0115253" } , { "url": "https://doi.org/10.18329/09757597/2015/8105", "doi": "10.18329/09757597/2015/8105" } , { "url": "https://doi.org/10.1108/GKMC-06-2019-0067", "doi": "10.1108/GKMC-06-2019-0067" } ], "authors": [ { "name": "Egon Willighagen", "url": "https://orcid.org/0000-0001-7542-0286" } ] } ] }