Avoiding Link Rot: A Scholarly Publisher’s Process for Preserving Online Citations

Abstract

While the digital era has made it much easier to share information in the short term, it is more difficult to trust the long-term stability of online material appearing in citations. Content can be revised after first publication, its location can change, or the content can be removed entirely. When this information is cited in other works, using either links or textual citations in print publications, URLs often return a familiar dreaded result: “page not found.” This poses significant issues for research works with expectations that quotations are substantiated with information about sources, and the phenomenon is common enough to have earned a pejorative nickname, “link rot.” A 2024 report by the Pew Research Centre found that 38% of webpages that existed in 2013 are no longer accessible in 2023. In the editorial process for book publishing, it is common for the link to an author’s online source to change before a manuscript is even fully edited, let alone by the time it is published as a finished book. Publishers, authors, readers, and researchers have been trying to mitigate the issue of link rot for decades. This shareable paper, published under a Creative Commons licence, details one such attempt to preserve at-risk online citations in scholarly books. We provide general guidance for preventing link rot in publications and outline some of the steps that Concordia University Press has taken, in collaboration with the Concordia University Library, to avoid the issue of link rot for citations appearing in select Concordia University Press books.