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WebCite – Persistent URLs for publishers

My favorite techie points us to WebCite.

WebCite has a different, and very special, mission. It’s for scholarly and professional authors whose articles are themselves persistently linkable by way of Digital Object Identifiers. Increasingly those articles cite more ephemeral things, like blog entries. Using a WebCite bookmarklet, these authors can produce URLs that point to archived copies of web pages. Think Wayback Machine, but you can ask to have an item archived and be sure that it will be.

A laudable effort and one I hope will be supported by all publishers. Perhaps it can be part of a standard for linking publications with web content

Of course, this only adds to the challenge of trying to understand, define, and consolidate online identity.

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8 Comments

  1. pluto
    Posted November 15, 2007 at 00:39 | Permalink

    on a slightly related note, check out this greasemonkey script I’ve been working on to add citation data to Pubmed searches: http://userscripts.org/scripts/show/13704

  2. pluto
    Posted November 15, 2007 at 02:39 | Permalink

    on a slightly related note, check out this greasemonkey script I've been working on to add citation data to Pubmed searches: http://userscripts.org/scripts/show/13704

  3. Posted November 15, 2007 at 08:53 | Permalink

    I’m concerned about the way this is being done. For one, using a TinyURL scheme destroys the human readable info in the permalinks we’ve all worked to create. Second, I doubt that putting everything into one central repository will improve the percent availability of the collection, and if something does happen, there’s a central point of failure.

    Is the cost of a high-availability web mirror database equal to or below the value of citations that the content owner and citing author don’t find important enough to keep updated themselves?

  4. Posted November 15, 2007 at 10:53 | Permalink

    I'm concerned about the way this is being done. For one, using a TinyURL scheme destroys the human readable info in the permalinks we've all worked to create. Second, I doubt that putting everything into one central repository will improve the percent availability of the collection, and if something does happen, there's a central point of failure.

    Is the cost of a high-availability web mirror database equal to or below the value of citations that the content owner and citing author don't find important enough to keep updated themselves?

  5. Posted November 15, 2007 at 22:10 | Permalink

    I actually don’t mind the human readable issue, since IMO the best use for something like this is for machines. I do agree that putting everything in one repository is not the best idea, but I do like the idea of an aggregation URI, especially one that persists information.

    Early days for a lot of such stuff. Things will get better as time goes on.

  6. Posted November 16, 2007 at 00:10 | Permalink

    I actually don't mind the human readable issue, since IMO the best use for something like this is for machines. I do agree that putting everything in one repository is not the best idea, but I do like the idea of an aggregation URI, especially one that persists information.

    Early days for a lot of such stuff. Things will get better as time goes on.

  7. Posted November 16, 2007 at 15:30 | Permalink

    The people at CrossRef have weighed in on this, and given their previous experience, I think they merit a listen.

    At least CrossRef knows that you can request addition of material to archive.org, one of the raisons d’être given by webcite for the use of its service instead of archive.org

  8. Posted November 16, 2007 at 17:30 | Permalink

    The people at CrossRef have weighed in on this, and given their previous experience, I think they merit a listen.

    At least CrossRef knows that you can request addition of material to archive.org, one of the raisons d'être given by webcite for the use of its service instead of archive.org

2 Trackbacks

  1. [...] The wierd thing is that Deepak Singh just blogged about WebCite a few hours ago, which he picked up on from Jon Udell’s blog. Perhaps it is just morphic resonance [...]

  2. By I have reservations about WebCite at Synthesis on November 15, 2007 at 09:43

    [...] Via BBGM, I hear of WebCite, an on-demand Wayback Machine for web content cited within academic publications. It’s important to make sure that links to web content in academic publications don’t fail to resolve to their intended content over time, but how valuable is it, and whose responsibility is it? [...]

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