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In 2020, I was a few months into my doctoral dissertation process with the idea that I would be researching plagiarism in the digital publication system. That was when I first encountered the true extent of link rot in digital scholarship. Link rot is the phenomenon of resources becoming inaccessible across time when their originally cited location is relocated or permanently unavailable.
While doing my literature review, I would find articles that cited resources relevant to my topic, but the links to those artifacts would not be available. A university research database usually provides access to most journals that I would want to read, but this was different. It was not that I was denied access; it was that access was no longer possible. The artifact had been lost to link rot, like many others before.
Research in the field of link rot has revealed some concerning statistics. At Harvard Law School's Berkman Klein Center for Internet and Society, Jonathan L. Zittrain, Kendra Albert, and Lawrence Lessig found that around 50% of links in Supreme Court cases were broken ("Perma: Scoping and Addressing the Problem of Link and Reference Rot in Legal Citations," Harvard Public Law Review, Vol. 127, No. 4, March 2014; harvardlawreview.org/forum/vol-127/per ma-scoping-and-addressing-the-problem-of-linkand-reference-rot-in-legal-citations). Another study, by Karol Król and Dariusz Zdonek, published in Global Knowledge, Memory and Communication ("Peculiarity of the Bit Rot and Link Rot Phenomena," Vol. 69, No. 1/2: pp. 20-37, 2020; https://doi. org/10.1108/gkmc-06-2019-0067) found that 70% of articles in the Harvard Law Review were also broken. While many early studies focused on the field of law, studies on the broad collection of academic publications followed.
Library and information scientists often point to persistent identifiers, such as DOIs, as a resolution to the problem. But how effective are DOIs? A study by Martin Klein and Lyudmila Balakireva at the Los Alamos National Laboratory looked at the availability of DOIs inside and outside an institution's internal network. They found that 33% of DOIs were inaccessible from within the internal network, and an astonishing 51.7% of DOIs were inaccessible outside the institution's network ("An Extended Analysis of the Persistence of Persistent Identifiers of the Scholarly Web," International Journal of Digital Libraries, Vol. 23, October 2021; doi.org/10.1007/s00799-021-00315w). In addition, a recent study from...