[Air-L] Antw: Re: Inclusion of short links in academic publications?

[Joseph Reagle]

On Tuesday, July 26, 2011, Montathar Faraon wrote:
> Plus, a previous writer said that we don't know how long sites such as
> bit.ly last or if they disappear over time. This as well is not a good
> argument because the same risk exist with every full link included in a
> paper.

But as I noted before, it's a distributed risk over N sites.

> There is of course a difference between a paper that is  completely
> based on bit.ly and a paper that only contain one bit.ly-link. The former
> will become less referenced over time as none of it's references work which
> won't allow researchers to verify the content.

I'll also note that we are treading on trampled ground in a way as it is a reprise of the DOI, URI, URL, URN, URC, and PURL battles from the 90s. When I was at the W3C, we worked on a lot of issues for ourselves [1] and ending up making an institutional commitment to maintain our URIs [2]. Of course, the W3C might not last forever, but we also roped in our hosts, and it is unlikely that MIT, ERCIM, and Keio would all disappear. The OCLC was behind PURL, but I don't know to what extent it is used...

[1]: http://www.w3.org/2005/07/13-nsuri
[2]: http://www.w3.org/Consortium/Persistence