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Examining Persistence of European Open Repository Infrastructure and its Diffusion in the Scholarly Record
Authors : George Macgregor, Joy Davidson
This article seeks to determine the extent to which the principle of persistence is observed by repositories and the organizations that operate them. In addition, the impact that negative repository persistence levels may be having on the scholarly record is assessed.
This is achieved by interrogating and combining data on European repositories from several repository registries and web-scraped sources, including the Internet Archive’s Wayback Machine, which creates a unique dataset of historic repository locations and their OAI-PMH endpoints.
Then, this data is used as the basis for text mining CORE, a vast corpus of scholarly outputs, to determine the extent to which impersistent European repository content has permeated the scholarly literature. The findings indicate that over one-fifth of European repositories (greater than 20 per cent) could be classified as “dead,” with an even greater proportion (greater than 40 per cent) of the machine interfaces associated with these repositories similarly dead.
Problematically, this analysis indicates that approximately 12,000 unique scholarly works cite, refer to, or actively use this repository content, amounting to approximately 19,000 unique repository locations, all of which are now dead and unretrievable from their stated resource locations. Partly owing to limitations in available repository registry data and the existence of “zombie” repositories, there are reasons to conclude that the total number of scholarly works referring to dead repository content is far higher.
In addition, evidence of dead repository content entering the current scholarly record is found, which is described as “dead on arrival” referencing.
The implications of these observations are considered, explanations are proffered, and possible policy interventions to address repository persistence are proposed. The dataset also enables several observations on the nature of impersistent repositories to be made, including their profile and their decay rate.
URL : Examining Persistence of European Open Repository Infrastructure and its Diffusion in the Scholarly Record
DOI : https://doi.org/10.2218/ijdc.v20i1.1116
